Management Bits and Tips

Management as a discipline has its own language (bit). Use language learning devices like dictionaries and practice, practice, practice business speaking and writing using every opportunity (tip).

What business management dictionary can I recommend for technical managers that covers most frequently used phrases and terminology with the fewest number of pages possible so you can carry it with you? This one seems very good for beginners:

The Routledge Dictionary of Business Management

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Have you ever felt doubt assigning or distributing “meets some”, “meets all” or “exceeds performance” ratings across your team members when delivering feedback during performance appraisals? This is the problem for high performance team leads promoted to management positions. They compare other team members to their past performance and feel that all fall under “meets all” category at best. However they should take the mean of performance indicators and rate team members according to that mean value. For example, your team members had goals to write knowledge base articles (without specifying the predefined number of them). Sure when you were the team lead you wrote 20 of them during one night. That’s why you were promoted Now you see that Adam wrote 1, Sophie wrote 3 and John wrote 5. Hmm, they look all underperforming for you. However, this team without you as an engineer is the new team. So calculate the mean value (1+3+5)/3  = 3. Therefore, it would be fair to say that Adam “meets some”, Sophie “meets all” and John “exceeds performance”.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

What is your philosophical and ethical foundation for all your managerial actions? I finally understood that mine is called Managerial Stoicism and is based on an old school of Hellenistic philosophy that advocates self-improvement and self-control. The idea to coin this term came to me after attending a management course and I’ll talk more about it later.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Full stomach affects clear thinking (bit). Avoid abrupt talking about work-related issues requiring thoughtful considerations and making decisions just after having a full lunch (tip).

Right after your lunch or close to its end you might loose control and start talking straight to someone and use language that sends your message to a wrong direction and you get opposite results. I personally read science fiction and history books during my lunch time and keep silence. Keeping silence probably deserves its own management bit.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com - 

I’ve created a page that lists existing and future patterns:

http://www.managementbits.com/project-failure-analysis-patterns/

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

What is an equivalent to computer memory in organizations and teams? It is the collection of various artifacts including project documentation, source code, financial documents, etc. What is a computer memory corruption? It is a deviation from expected memory contents that may or may not lead to a crash or a hang but the chances of that are increasing over time. Metaphorically we can consider deviations from requirements or expected documentation content to be some sort of a corruption that might slowly lead to a project failure over time. Surely “project memory” or “organization memory” is dynamic or heap-like in nature as documents are added to a pile or removed from it. Therefore we have just established the mapping between Dynamic Memory Corruption pattern from crash dump analysis domain to Project Artifact Corruption pattern. 

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Past performance, success and achievement record doesn’t mean that the same would hold in the future (bit). Look for environment and hidden factors that explain the lucky side of success and evaluate it for new environment (tip).

This bit and tip was influenced by the following book I vehemently recommend:

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Although the book focuses on trading and material success the ideas can be applied to hiring decisions and team building. Especially, contrary to the popular opinion that the past poor performance stays poor in the future, I’ve seen examples when poor past performance changed to more than average if not exceptional after environmental changes. These changes doesn’t mean changing the company to work for or pursuing entrepreneurial career but could be changes inside the same company. When hiring or promoting I would also recommend to look for the number of people in the team. It is one case when there was a small team with 2 members and one star performer and a completely different case when a team had 10 members with one star (clearly Team Lead position). However, if a candidate was a star in 5 companies but teams were 2-3 people in size we clearly have the star performer against 10 - 15 people.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -