Collaborator Sklls – Innovative Management Tools

Book Review: A Crocodile Brain Can Make or Break Your Sale – The Process and Science for Guiding Organizations to Buy from You

Patrick — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 15:15:42 +0000

In this 12-minute book review podcast, you will hear some interesting and important messages and themes from my recently published book. Look for it on Amazon, Apple Books, and Barnes&Noble.

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PRIORITIZE – Priority Management Activity

Patrick — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 13:34:02 +0000

Multiple, new projects + Limited talent with special skills + Worker shortage = Priority Management Urgency.

With our ongoing surveying of Organizational Challenges (contact me to participate in the 15-minute survey), Priority Management ranks #2 out of the 28 categories polled with an incredible 94.1% of current respondents siting two scenarios that are creating challenges for them:

1) Project teams that launched into action in the past without an adequate plan on how to prioritize resources have created problems and now the company wants to plan a project in a different way to avoid creating problems. Companies realize that a different approach should be considered because the past way of doing things did not ensure success.

2) The same employees are on multiple projects at the same time and need help in prioritizing how to spread their time and talent.

Looking across the talent pool of people who will be on projects, certain individuals are getting pulled into too many directions and need guidance from “the powers that be” to define priorities. If not, burnout is a very real outcome possibility.

Enter the Conversation Framework PRIORITIZE – Priority Management Activity. Designed to guide a group of people through a process of taking a “laundry list” of things to do and assign the tasks to the available resources, based on skills. Having this view of who does what, visually, and with the perspective how overloaded a person might be or where skills gaps exist, BEFORE launching into the project is priceless information and help create a better roadmap for project success. The same activity could be used to review the myriad of open projects and who is involved in each one to spot overload for individual contributors.

Conversation Frameworks – Guiding the Power and Ideas from Within.

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PROFILE – Skills Assessment Activity

Patrick — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 14:41:56 +0000

“Some employees don’t seem to be the best fit for a position but aren’t horrible either. Need to understand their skill set to find a better fit.”

“Certain departments have been caught without the needed skills present among the staff, causing issues, backlogs, or customer issues.”

“Some “good” employees are never invited to be on projects mainly because the breadth and depth of their skills is not fully understood, resulting in continually relying on a few people and overloading those people.”

Do any of these comments sound familiar to you? Are you and your colleagues having conversations about one of these topics with HR, the owner of the company, or between yourselves?

My guess is that you are because in an on-going survey of companies performed by Innovative Management Tools, these scenarios as a group rank #2 out of 28 groups as the most frequent challenges today.

If you have been “talking” about these scenarios and things don’t seem to be changing much, maybe it’s time to take a different approach. Talk about the topic in a collaborative, engaging, and comprehensive way.

Enter the Conversation Framework PROFILE – Skills Assessment Activity. PROFILE allows a department or company take a proactive approach to taking an inventory of staff across a variety of skills to better understand what talents each person brings to the table. Many of these talents might not be known to people because they were developed or learned at another company and have never been used in their current position. Untapped talent that could serve the company and enrich the employee’s contribution to the company.

Taking an in-depth inventory of employees (outside of looking at résumés or CVs) is a worthwhile endeavor. There is likely a goldmine of talents and skills deep across the company that is just waiting to be uncovered and leveraged.

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