The Knowledge Bites blog - grow your skills

Running an engaging meeting Unfortunately, if you ask most people in any organisation, they’ll likely tell you that they attend too many meetings. The first key element in an engaging meeting is knowing what the meeting needs to achieve. If you don’t spell this out, then the meeting lacks direction, drags on too long, and people don’t see the point in being there. Desired Outcome Statement A Desired Outcome Statement is a short, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic, Time-constrained) statement which shows you what you want to happen at the end of your meeting. An example could be: By the end of this meeting, we will have an agreement on the current status of our sales, and five actions to give sales a boost. Having a statement of this sort in place at the beginning of planning for your meeting enables you to build the entire event with this in mind, including: Setting the topic Inviting the right people Engaging the right people in advance Considering th...

By Neil Shorney, Director of Navanter Knowledge Bites . Time to read: 2 minutes. My last strategy for you in this little series on remote management, is about one of the biggest problems of managers of remote teams: how to motivate people from a distance. We all know what motivation is – it’s the feeling we have when we really want to do something, which drives us forward, and helps us to work more quickly and efficiently. What’s sometimes less understood is what it actually means to motivate other people. From a management and leadership perspective, motivating others is about taking positive, decisive actions to create feelings of motivation and desire to achieve, in another person. And whilst there are certainly some general things you can do to motivate groups of people, such as sharing the organisational strategy, giving feedback and thanking people, motivation is much more effective when people are treated as individuals who have specific motivational needs. Because people are in...

By Neil Shorney, Director of Navanter Knowledge Bites . Time to read: 2 minutes. So what have we looked at so far? We've looked at how different people have different needs (did you take the NPSI test I offered you? Just use access code: RMTK) and we've looked at tasking . Today, I'd like to share with you the COURAGE™ coaching conversation structure to guide your tasking conversations. The COURAGE™ framework is an ideal tool to guide your conversations so that your remote staff feel supported in their tasks. It reminds us of the 7 conversation elements we should be having with our remote staff to ensure that management works remotely as well as face-to-face. COURAGE™ stands for:     Current task: What should they be working on?     Ordinary state: What’s their current performance level?     Ultimate state: Where could their performance level realistically get to?     Required steps: How are they going to complete the task? ...

By Neil Shorney, Director of Navanter Knowledge Bites . Time to read: 2 minutes. I hope you’ve got some ideas about the needs of your diverse team members after part 1 of this series . Here's my next key element for remote management: Tasking . When managing remotely, the key to success is managing by task. Employees, particularly junior ones but not exclusively, need to feel that their efforts are being noticed. But when either they or the manager are working remotely, this becomes a problem, because they don’t feel noticed, unless the manager takes extra steps to show appreciation or interest in their day-to-day work. By managing by task, rather than relying on general office communication, managers can give employees a much greater sense that their efforts have been noticed. What does “managing by task” mean? It means basing a lot (but not all) of interaction time on tasks that need to be completed. It means taking a greater interest in an employee’s progress thr...

By Neil Shorney, Director of Navanter Knowledge Bites . Time to read: 2 minutes. Welcome to part 1 in a little series of posts about remote and hybrid management. Many managers have realised over the last couple of years, that their existing management skills aren't quite up to the job of managing when their staff are remote. Yet remote working is clearly something that's here to stay, even post-Covid (whenever that may be!) so there's never been a better time to think about changes that can be made in order to be more effective from a distance.  One of the key considerations for managing remotely compared to in person, is the needs of the employee. Many employees have, for a long time, been operating in an environment which is contradictory to their personality style – they took jobs which included the ability to work from an office, yet for a long time, they’ve been working in isolation. It’s not just the isolation from their colleagues which is causing people stress, but...

By Neil Shorney, CEO,  Navanter Knowledge Bites . Time to read: 1 minute. When managing remotely, the key to success is managing by task. Employees, particularly junior ones but not exclusively, need to feel that their efforts are being noticed. But when either they or the manager are working remotely, this becomes a problem, because they don’t feel noticed, unless the manager takes extra steps to show appreciation or interest in their day-to-day work. By managing by task, rather than relying on general office communication, managers can give employees a much greater sense that their efforts have been noticed. What does “managing by task” mean? It means basing a lot (but not all) of interaction time on tasks that need to be completed. It means taking a greater interest in an employee’s progress through a task, rather than just acknowledging completion. And it means offering the right level of support throughout the duration of a task. The key for the manager is to set tasks at the ...