Trent Gillaspie

I learned a pretty important lesson today, from a friend of mine, that I’m sure we’ve all learned plenty of times. However, I feel like it hit home today because of the context in my life right now, as well as how succinctly it was presented to me. It consisted of two general topics:

A.) Don’t sell yourself short when given the opportunity to evaluate yourself.

B.) Don’t act like you can do something you don’t know a lot about, because you may get yourself into deep water later.

Speaking to point A first, I know that I commonly fell victim to this when I was in school, even up to right before graduating from college. There is a simple routine each time a professor gives you a form on which to evaluate yourself. There always seemed to be a sense of humility with it, “If I think I deserve an ‘A’, I’ll put down ‘B’ to seem a bit more humble, even though the professor knows that I earned an ‘A’ because of my clear accomplishments in the class. While I have to experience this in the work world, I’ve been informed that this is not always the case when it comes to grading in the corporate world. More often than not, the grade you give yourself is exactly what your supervisor feels you deserve. This isn’t to say you mark ‘A’ when you blatantly earned a ‘B’, because that will shine through too, and your supervisor may just as well give you a ‘B’ in that case too.

With respect to the second lesson above, B, I am referring to those ever-so-special moments when someone asks, “Can you do ‘x’?” or “Are you familiar with ‘y’?” Some of us, so eager to prove our knowledge fresh out of school, think to ourselves, “I don’t know anything about it, but I can certainly learn it.” However, we step up to the plate and answer with the desired simplicity of, “Yes.” This puts us in a tough situation that we may not realize. The supervisor, or person who asks you if such skills are in your bag of tricks, then goes to the person they’re responding to and says, “I found [Insert Name Here] who is the all-knowing guru of ‘x’.” This not only poses problems with the perception of your skills, but also makes for some interesting situations later when deliverables are asked of you that you can do nothing, but fail to deliver on, because sometimes the learning curve can be much greater than expected. Especially in the short amount of time between your response to your supervisor and your first high-level assignment.

So, accurately assess your performance throughout a project or anything that you do, so you can accurately portray your efforts in ratings at the end of the assignment. Don’t sell yourself short, but be realistic in your rating of yourself. Most importantly, come in with some data to back yourself up. That ALWAYS looks good. Accomplishing what is expected of you and beyond certainly goes a long way in that end rating. And, secondly, don’t be so eager to get involved with something and help out that you say you know something that you don’t necessarily know. You can exhaust all of your resources later when you need to deliver, but it may not be enough to meet the needs of your superiors based on their built-up expectations of you that were already set by your response when asked about your skill set.

The most important thing for managers to keep in mind when acquiring new talent is the balance of responsibility. We have all seen the imbalance more times than we can count. Whether it be people brought onto a team and given absolutely nothing to do, or people brought onto a team and overloaded with stressful work; we can recognize that both of these scenarios lead to the almost immediate destruction of personal motivation.

I have far too many times been entered into a project with high expectations, only to be put to no use. Even with lowered expectations, there often remains a lack of responsibilities delegated via managers. This also happens if a team member gets overwhelmed and no longer has the desire to work.

That being said, a manager needs to have goals and delegatable tasks laid out to be assigned accordingly and at logical time intervals. These tasks also need to be rewarded (whether it be with praise or the delegation of another task). This leads to continued satisfaction, without devastating amounts of commitment and the feeling of being overwhelmed. Here are several quick steps to effective management in the realm of motivating those working under you.

1. Develop a list of necessary responsibilities ahead of time and get an idea of the amount of time and effort they will take. (These should be laid out in the order they can be accomplished in a timeline fashion)

2. If you have the choice, only acquire the amount of workers necessary to complete the task in the given time. More often than not, large amounts of tasks can be completed by far less people than you think without overwhelming them, and giving them a steady amount of workload.

3. When tasks are completed, have follow-up tasks to be assigned, or if you see a person struggling, attach the person done with their work to accompany the teammate and aid in the workload, which improves teaching for one worker, and learning for the other.

4. Any way you put it, show those working under you that you appreciate what they are doing for you. Whether this is out of the company’s pocket, or your own, it goes a long way to show others you appreciate their hard work. Anything from dinner out, to a small gift goes an unbelievably long way.

Most importantly, throughout the whole process, experiment enough to find out what is and isn’t working for the team. Teams all behave differently than one another, and more often than not, some of the main techniques can be applied, but have to be tailored individually to fit the unique team characteristics. Be open with those working under you, but keep things on task, in order to promote further motivation, and prevent those working below you from feeling like they have nothing to do or too much to do, and losing motivation to help you further in your endeavors.

The technology of today’s world is very different from that of the past, but there are some things that never change. We often see all of the incredible benefits new technology brings, but less often focus on the problems that come along with it. These are all things I’ve personally learned from.

Conference Call Monitoring

When it comes to corporate conference calls, you may be on mute the entire time or you may be actively participating in the conversation, but when the call is over, think twice about hanging on the line to talk to someone on the call about the call. Most conference lines have an administrator (the coworker that setup the call) that, even when everyone including them has signed off the call except you and a select person or two, has access to the content of the line. There are all too often comments made about the call that the administrator may catch when reviewing the line later. It’s not big brother, but it can be a bit scary.

Forwarded E-Mail Appointments

In MS Outlook, watch out for someone forwarding you a meeting because even when you just hit “Reply” the response will not to the person who sent you the e-mail, but the original creator of the meeting or event. A comment like, “I’m not going to be attending because I don’t see the point in the meeting” can begin to dig you a few holes you’ll have to cover up. Just a thought.

IM’s vs. E-Mails

When communicating directly with people quickly, think about what method of contact works best FOR THE RECIPIENT. IM should be used as exactly that, “instant” messages that require immediate attention. These are very interruption driven, even more so than a phone call sometimes. To help keep a message “alive” in someone’s mind, IM’s are instant and are often immediately forgotten. E-mail has a trail, and thus more “legs” or “life.” If the recipient cant help you now, they may be able to help you in the future, but an IM completely negates that. E-mail is kept in a folder (if they don’t delete everything!), and is much easier to forward to peers of the recipient if they might be able to offer better help. The audience might be getting hundreds or thousands of emails a day. An e-mail enables a trail to be kept, and important information to be attached to a summary. This limits interruptions to the recipient. 

All this being said brings up the opposite though. If your goal is to be immediately forgotten, and interrupt someone with immediate requests, then IM is your best bet. I rely on it all too often, but I assume rereading this post will help my e-mail etiquette in the future.

Hope these help out a bit, or pose some interesting thoughts/discussion. Any thoughts and tips you have are always welcome!