By design, a manager’s job is to manage people. This requires telling your staff what to work on and then providing them feedback on their job performance. It also requires that you provide upper management with the status of projects, accomplishments and issues. At a department level, it’s also your role to facilitate the coordination with other department such as HR, finance and your peer departments. The bottom line is that the better you communicate, the easier it will be for you to become an effective manager. Depending on your professional area and your personal strengths and weaknesses, good communication can be a difficult thing to achieve. From an educational perspective, I went to college for accounting and computer information systems. Of the fifty classes I took over four years as an undergraduate student, only one optional elective dealt with personal communication. This was a class on public speaking. For many of us, particularly those of us in technical roles, we were told that we did such a good job as an individual contributor in our profession area, that we should take a new job (as manager) where we had no formal training, no on-the-job experience, and no formal education on proper business communication. Thus, a new manager was born. As a manager, communication takes many forms, as outlined below. Justify your budget requirements Write status reports Make presentation to justifying hiring needs Giving work direction to your team Write and give performance reviews Facilitate staff meeting Participating in cross-department activities When looking [...]

Every interpersonal endeavor includes an aspect of influence. In negotiation, you’re influencing someone to move closer to your point of view. In conflict resolution, you’re influencing two people or organizations to solve their issues and get along. In organizational change, the topic of this blog post, you’re influencing a person or organization to do something in a different way. This blog combines influence-based and change-based concepts into a single activity. It begins by giving a high-level overview of our ERICA Change Management Framework, then provides examples of how each framework components can be assisted via the use of influence-based techniques and concepts. When reading this blog, please consider it from two perspectives, first, as this blog suggests, on how you can use influence-based concepts to enhance your organizational change activities, second, how you can use these 15 influence techniques in other ways to your professional advantage. Figure #1 displays the five components of the ERICA organizational change framework. E: Environment: Organizational change is framed within its “Environment”, the reasons and circumstances for the change R: Resources: The people, funding, organizational support and other company assets that are available to help facilitate the change. I: Individuals: The people who being asked to change their job roles, skills, tasks or other personally felt items C: Culture: The culture or micro-cultures of the organization in which the change will occur A: Actions: The change management plan, execution of the plan and measurement of expected and unexpected result With the ERICA framework explained, let’s discuss how ERICA’s [...]

I'm in the process of writing a new book titled: "Office Influence: Get What You Want, From the Mailroom to the Boardroom" ™ To this end, I'm trying to understand how influence is achieved within the workplace via the below survey. As a thank for completing the survey, when the book is published in the spring, I'll give you a free copy of the book and access to various online tools related to the book's content! The survey asks your opinion on how important various personal and professional attributes are to influencing others within the workplace. It also asks a small amount of optional demographic data to assist in the research. Please click here to take our survey on office influence!

Enhancing your workplace influence has many professional advantages. It helps you gain approval for your business initiatives, acquire needed resources, survive organizational realignments, and position you for short-term promotions and long-term professional success. Please click here to take our survey on office influence! Here are 15 techniques that are easy to describe, but very difficult to implement, that will help you maximize your person workplace power and influence. You can't do them all at once. My suggestion to you is to pick the one that most resonates with you personally and work to achieve it. Then, once you have internalized it as part of your professional repertoire, go back to this list a select other items, one at a time, with the goal of continually adding arrows to your professional influence quiver. 1. Provide Execution Excellence Job #1 in any business role is to be a top performer in regard to your: Quality of work Level of effort Enthusiasm for the organization These attributes will simultaneously enhance your job performance and increase you workplace influence. 2. Be Proactive Being reactive is performing tasks upon request. While this is of great importance, it's not enough. Being proactive is: * Showing initiative * Seeking client opinions on how service quality can be enhanced * Discovering new services that need to be implementation * Discontinuing services that are no longer needed * Providing technical thought leadership These proactive type activities position you as an internal agent of change, an asset to the organization and force to be [...]