It’s been a busy break here at the end of the year.  Enjoying my Christmas and New Year’s holidays and getting ready for 2014!

I started my break taking Michael Hyatt’s course on 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever  This gives you some good guidance on how to look at last year, how to set your goals and how to push through when you feel like giving up.  Pretty good series.  I also read the ebook Goals by Eric Fisher and Jim Woods.  Another good read on the idea of setting and achieving your goals.  Of course, Brian Tracy, Darren Hardy and Jim Rohn are still my main sources of information on goal setting so I went back and re-read some of their books on the subject.

I set my goals based on the “Wheel of Life” concept from Zig Ziglar.  I use the same 7 areas of life that he has in the link:  Spiritual, Health, Family, Social, Career, Financial and Personal Growth.

One of the things that I am trying to obtain is being more “intentional” in my life.  What I’ve observed so far in life is that you can pick one of two paths.  You can go along and drift with the tide or you can intentionally decide what you want and go after it.  When I graduated from high school, I thought I wanted to be a musician. So I skipped the normal college route and went out on tour with a band.  When we got back, I took some classes at the junior college without a specific goal.  One thing led to another until my brother-in-law asked me if I’d be interesting in working for his Dad at Cobbledick-Kibbe Glass company in San Jose.  I never really decided what I wanted, things just happened.

Contrast that with my sister, who left high school and got a job because she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do.  After 6 months of drifting, she woke up one day and decided that she was going to be a doctor.  She had no money for college or medical school and no idea how she was going to do it, but she just made up her mind, worked really hard and now she is a doctor.

The funny thing is, I can tell you so many stories about people who set specific goals in their life, worked really hard to achieve them, and succeeded.  I can’t tell you any stories about people who set goals, worked really hard and failed.  Even if you don’t hit the goal, you still end up somewhere amazing.

As I looked back on this last year, my year was filled with things that I wanted to achieve.  There were still other things (like my trip to London to investigate an interesting solar technology from the University of Oxford) that were out of the blue, but for the most part, I was intentional about what I wanted the year to look like and I was able to achieve most of my goals.  This idea of creating a written document of what you want to work on and then setting out to do it is quite powerful and I’m extremely happy with the progress I’m making.  I’ve learned more and grown more in the last year than in any previous year of my life.

As I look back on 2013, I can really see the impact of being “intentional” about my life.  I’ve set some pretty stretch goals for myself in the coming year and I’m excited to see if  I can achieve them!  Happy New Year!

As most of you know, the glazing industry isn’t exactly flooded with women.  I was listening to a podcast the other day and they sited a study from MIT regarding team performance.

The study was performed to understand what made a high performing team.  The initial thought was that the IQ of the individual team members would result in higher performance.  This did not play out.

Professors Woolley and Malone, along with Christopher Chabris, Sandy Pentland, and Nada Hashmi, gave subjects aged 18 to 60 standard intelligence tests and assigned them randomly to teams. Each team was asked to complete several tasks—including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles—and to solve one complex problem. Teams were given intelligence scores based on their performance. Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn’t earn much higher scores, those that had more women did.

So, the finding was that a higher percentage of women on the team was the best way to predict team performance.

The other factors in the study were the team’s ability to gauge each other’s mood and the way that the team communicated. More dialog and less arguing would also contribute to team effectiveness.

Creating a more diversified workforce should be everyone’s goal.  This study definitely lends credence to the fact that more women on your team and in your company can improve the company’s performance.

Hope everyone has a very merry Christmas!

A couple of years ago, I took a class at Stanford with some of the guys at work.  The class was called:  Excellence is no Accident: Mental Skills Training for Work, Sports and Life.  There was a group of about 7 of us and the professor asked us to pick a goal that we could accomplish over the course of the class.

The interesting thing was that we were all struggling with what to pick.  The fun part about taking a night course at Stanford is having dinner in downtown Palo Alto before the class (ok, and maybe a glass of wine too).  So we were sitting at dinner and we were all struggling over what our goal should be.  It struck me that all the people I was with are very accomplished professionals.  Many of them are project managers who have run multi-million dollar projects for years.  They know exactly how to execute and achieve an outcome.  But sometimes the hardest thing to do isn’t getting what you want, but deciding what you want.

So, I picked a goal.  I set a goal to be able to do a set of 20 pull-ups.  Just something simple that I could work on.  Now, I suck at pull-ups.  I always have.  I had a hard time doing 2 or 3 in a row.  So, it wasn’t an easy goal, but it was something.

So here is what I learned.  The most important thing, is just get moving.  When you set out on the journey, you won’t be granted some amazing vision of exactly what you want to achieve in life.  You aren’t going to have some divine inspiration that tells you exactly what you are meant to be or meant to do.  I kept waiting for that and it never came.  But when I started moving, just doing my pull-ups every morning and making small gains, I began to realize that getting started is the hardest part.  Once you are moving and growing, more opportunities become available.  It’s like that thing they tell you in driver’s ed in high school.  If you slam on the brakes and your tires aren’t moving, you can’t steer the car.  It’s like that in life.  If your wheels aren’t moving, you won’t be able to change directions.

Getting moving is like a flashlight when you are walking down a dark road.  It won’t show you the whole road, but you see far enough ahead to be able to make course corrections.

So, I started making some small daily changes in my life to get me moving.  I started walking every day to begin getting healthier.  I started listening to Podcasts and Audio Books on my walks to begin improving my mind and get new ideas.  I began writing and blogging to get my ideas out and help clarify my thinking.  I began setting some smaller goals to begin having some wins and change my mindset.  All of these things have helped me to really start seeing what my bigger purpose wants to be.  Just the start of doing a few little things consistently over time has really changed my outlook and helped me understand better what I want to do with my life and what legacy I want to leave on this earth.

So, while I have only been able to hit 10-15 pull-ups so far, I know I will get to 20 some day.  But it taught me a lesson about not waiting to know exactly what I want before I begin.  Inspiration is not the power to get you moving, inspiration is the product of the journey.

At this time of the year, one of the more important and difficult tasks is the annual review.  Now, coming from the glazing industry, I really didn’t have much of an example for how this should work.  I never had a review until I came to Walters & Wolf!  So, when I was promoted to this position, I needed to come up with some type of system.  I thought I’d share what I’ve been doing.  I know that I always wanted to have a review.  If you are a manager and are not currently doing reviews, maybe this article will help you get started.  If you are already doing reviews, hopefully some things in here could help with your process.

First, let’s start with the purpose.  There is a lot of opinions out there about performance reviews.  A lot of them are negative.  In fact, there are many people that argue that this process should be eliminated because it is done so poorly.  I think that the performance review is very valuable.  I think it can be a very positive experience for both the manager and the employee.  There are three key things I’m trying to accomplish in a review.

First, are we on the same page?  Does my opinion of how you are doing, and your opinion match up?  Are the things I think are important for you and the things you are prioritizing the same?

Second, I want to know how you did.  You have goals you are trying to achieve and projects you are trying to complete.  How did you do?  What things did you learn?  We build our resume every day.  If you were updating your resume and adding some new accomplishment bullets to it, what would they be?

Third, let’s talk about where we are going.  What should you be focusing on going forward?  What training or coaching will you need to accomplish your goals?  Where is your career headed?  What do you need to get there?  This is the most important part of the review and usually takes up 90% of the time.

So, I start with the job description.  This document describes what I should be seeing you do each day.  It also gives an overview of the philosophy of the company and also what the department focus is.  I review this document carefully and update it to match any changes that have occurred.  This is the first step in the review.

Second, we have a one page form for our “self-review”.  The top of the form has items from the job description and a ranking of 1 to 5 (one being I really don’t do this and five being I’m doing this all the time).  The middle of the form asks what you have accomplished this year and the bottom of the form asks what you are targeting to accomplish next year.  I send this out a week or two before the reviews.  I have them spend a little time re-reading the job description and then filling out their self-review.

Now, after I’ve received the self-reviews and have the updated job description, I write up a written review for each employee.  I let them know how I see things.  The accomplishments we have made over the past year and the goals we are shooting for moving forward.  Areas that they can help and what training or coaching may be required.  I send this written review to them at least a day before we meet.

I schedule an hour for the annual review meeting.  Now, I want to make it clear that I don’t really look at this as a review.  I look at this as a “preview”.  The purpose is not to explain how an entire year went by and the employee was doing all the wrong things.  Any corrective items should have been discussed in our one-on-one’s that we hold weekly.  No, this meeting is to celebrate the wins, or be honest about difficulties we have already discussed.

The very first part of the meeting we will go over the self-review.  I really just want to be sure we are on the same page about how we see things.  If they’ve rated themselves as all 5’s and I think they were mostly 2’s, we need to talk.  But please understand, if that happens, it’s my fault. I have a weekly one-on-one with every direct and I need to be making small course corrections all year long.  If my evaluation and their self-review don’t match, then I’m doing something wrong.  This hasn’t happened yet, so normally we are just touching on things that are one’s and two’s. Are these things still important?  Should we re-evaluate them?  For instance, we might have an item from the job description for someone in purchasing that says “update the report 3 every Thursday for the PM’s”.  If they have put that as a one or a two, then we need to decide if this item is not really working or if we need to re-focus on getting this to happen all the time.  We might want to see if the PM’s are really using this information.  If you haven’t really been doing it and no one is complaining, then maybe this item needs to be eliminated.

The second part of the meeting focuses on where we are going.  Usually, people are unsure of what to put down for the future goal.  This is normal.  I want to know what they want to focus on, but for the most part, people want to know what the company needs them to focus on.  This comes from our annual off-site and what the goals for the year are.  These get broken down to what each department will need to do to achieve that goal.  We then need to break that down into what each individual can do to help us get there.  This is where most of the meeting is focused.  I want to share what the upcoming year looks like, what the challenges are, what we need to do to get there, and then discuss how this particular employee can help with that.  We then will pencil in what those goals should look like.

The employee needs to set their goals.  I let them know the direction, but the goals are their choice.  They should align with the direction but they should be something they feel passionate about.

The actual summation of the goals will probably take a few more weeks to complete.  We can do this in our one-on-one meetings.  But at the end of the review, the employee knows how the year went, we have spent some time making sure we are aligned on the priorities and the focus, and we’ve established some specific things to work on in the coming year that will help them grow and help grow the company.

So, just to be clear, most of the ideas for this post come from manager tools.  When I was first promoted to this position, I was a bit overwhelmed.  My ability to perform and execute had finally paid off and now I’d been promoted.  In my new position, I was responsible for 45 people and 18 of them were direct reports!  I’d never managed more than one or two people in my life.  What should I do?

I started my search by reading books.  I couldn’t digest enough books on the subject of management.  One minute manager, Good to Great, First Break All The Rules, etc…  But I was still struggling with what my “day to day” process of managing would look like.  Lots of high level thinking, but very little actionable day to day stuff.  Then I discovered podcasts.  I found Manager Tools and started listening to Mark and Mike about the art of management.  Each session gave you specific, actionable items you could use in your day to day process.  And their number one tool?  One on One’s.

So what is the one on one?  It is a half hour meeting held weekly with your direct report.  It is that simple.  The structure is also simple.  10 minutes for them, 10 minutes for you  and 10 minutes for the future.  This structure will vary from week to week and person to person, but it is the basic framework for the meeting.

The purpose of this meeting is to develop a great relationship with the people you work with.  In all the studies that have  been done on employee engagement, the number one factor is the manager.  People don’t quit a company, they quit the manager.  So why wouldn’t you want to develop the best relationship possible with the people you work with?   This half hour each week gives you the opportunity to get to know your direct reports.  To know what is going on in their lives.  To know about their kids and their families.  The meeting starts with their 10 minutes because this meeting is all about them. They may want to tell you about something in their lives or they might want to dive right into work.  Either way, it is their time to tell you about what is really going on.  I usually start the meeting with something like:  “So, how are things going?”  Or:  “So Pete, what’s going on?”.  From there, it’s their show.  They might tell you about how they are feeling, they might talk about what they did on the weekend or an upcoming vacation, whatever they’d like.  After 10-15 minutes, we usually roll into questions about projects we are working on.  Each of my directs are working on projects outside their day-to-day work.  They may be teaching lean classes, implementing a new process or working on a team to improve something.  We will usually touch bases on this type of thing.

So that gives you an idea of what a one on one is.  Here is what it is NOT.  It is not a status meeting.  This is not the forum to keep tabs on everything the person is doing.  It is not your meeting.  You should not start the conversation and you should not cut them off at 10 minutes so you can talk about what you want to talk about.  This meeting is for them and at times it is 30 minutes of just what they want to talk about.

The other thing is that you have to commit to these meetings.  If you are going to start having one on one’s with your directs be sure you can commit to a time every week forever.  Don’t start these meetings then fall off.  That would send the completely wrong message to your people.  If you can’t commit to a half hour each week, don’t start at all.

So, now you might be wondering, how am I going to carve out a 1/2 hour each week for every direct?  As I mentioned, I had 18 directs when I started and that was a 9 hour a week commitment.  How was that going to work?  So I broke it up between two half days.  Tuesday afternoons and Wednesday mornings.  Don’t do Mondays or Fridays.  Too many holidays and people are off on those days more than the other days of the weeks.  Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays work best.

Here is what I found.  When I started this job, I would usually have a line outside my door where people needed to talk to me about things.  As I started the one on one’s, I found that since people knew they had a half hour with me every week, they began to just bring the items to the one on one.  I had given up part of my week but gained lots of control over the rest of my week.  In addition, some people don’t come to you unless there is a problem.  But if you are meeting with them weekly, they might talk to you about things they are unsure of and you can head off the problems all together.

This one tool has been the best thing I’ve ever implemented.  I feel like I have a great relationship with the people I work with.  I know their families, their struggles, their successes and what is really important to them.  I think it helps us communicate better and more regularly and I believe it has made me a better manager and a leader.

So, if you have the chance, check out the manager tools podcasts on one on ones.  They go into great detail about the whole process.  I just wanted to give you some insight into one of the best management tools I’ve found.