Tips how to be a Successful Manager.

Successful managers is a unique breed who understand people, motivation and how to breath life into an organization. Zoho4

Some tips to their success? Revised

1. Communication is everything

• Get to know your people, listen to their stories. Get to know their history and dreams. Where did they grow up? What do they want to accomplish in life? Who or what do they love? Who or what do they fear? Understanding people puts you in a position to proactively manage to their strengths and weaknesses. Bring up things you learned in conversations. You’ll make them feel important and stay connected.

• Let them get to know you. Be vulnerable with them. People are ten times more likely to go the distance for someone for whom they feel empathy.

• Use the information they share to motivate and inspire them. Find positive motivators rather than punitive ones. Tie their dreams to their goals. If someone doesn’t care about money but dreams of sailing the Caribbean, tie their annual bonus to a trip instead of cash incentive. If your employee had a tough childhood with unsupportive parents, be supportive. Challenge former athletes to compete for the love of the game. Give introverts the space they need to self manage.

• Keep their trust by handeling the obtained information as confidential.

2. Mentoring / Coaching

• Everyboby is unique. We all have different needs and desires. Some assimilate information issued verbally; others work better with written communication. Some get every project done on time, others get it done right. Work with each person as an individual and coach them to achieve their personal best.

• If you have to say “I am in charge” then you’re not. Don’t push your weight around or try to be the heavy. Threats and other fear-based motivators may feel seductive to your ego but they can be very destructive to staff morale and yield more negative than positive results.

• Help them achieve their dreams. If you show your employees that they can work hard and actualize their personal goals, they will perform better in the office and bring more value to the company. They will also be more loyal.

3. Set the Example

• Lead by example. People will work as hard as you and will resent it when you don’t. If you tell them to reach for the stars then sit back on your laurels, it won’t take long before the entire department or company at large stops striving for the best.

• Enjoy what you are doing. Joy is infectious. If you have found the key to enjoying your work, they will look for it too, because you help them to believe it exists. Remember that being real and vulnerable doesn’t mean letting yourself off the hook. Show employees that you do your best and they’ll meet the rising tide.

• Love working with people. If you don’t like working with people, you have the wrong title. If you think that managing is like babysitting, you’re in the wrong profession. As a manager, your job is the staff. Your clients are the staff. Management is a skill and a profession all on its own.

• Successful managers are good communicators, great listeners and excellent role models. They listen first, then speak in a way that shows they are in tune to their employees. They exemplify and inspire positive attitudes and habits. Remember that managing isn’t babysitting. Effective management trickles down through the ranks and empowers people to prioritize projects and align their actions to goals. When this happens everybody wins.

WHAT AN INTERESTING MAN… SOME FOOD FOR THOUGHT?

Alvin Toffler


Early life and career


Alvin Toffler was born in New York city in 1928. He met his future wife, Heidi, at New York University where he was an English major and she was starting a graduate course in linguistics. Being radical students, they decided against further graduate work, moved to the Midwestern United States, married, spending the next five years as blue-collar workers on assembly lines while studying industrial mass production in their daily work. Heidi became a union shop steward in the aluminum foundry where she worked. Alvin became a millwright and welder.

Their hands-on practical labor experience got Toffler a position on a union-backed newspaper, a transfer to its Washington bureau, then three years as a correspondent covering Congress and the White House for a Pennsylvania daily. Meanwhile his wife worked at a specialized library for business and behavioral science.

They returned to New York City when Fortune magazine invited Alvin to become its labor columnist, later having him write about business and management.

After leaving Fortune magazine, Alvin Toffler was hired by IBM to do research and write a paper on the social and organizational impact of computers, leading to his contact with the earliest computer "gurus" and artificial intelligence researchers and proponents. Xerox invited him to write about its research laboratory and AT&T consulted him for strategic advice. This AT&T work led to a study of telecommunications, which advised its top management for the company to break up more than a decade before the government forced AT&T to break up.

In the mid-60s the Tofflers began work on what would later become Future Shock.

In 1996, with Tom Johnson, an American business consultant, they co-founded Toffler Associates, an advisory firm designed to implement many of the ideas the Tofflers have written on. The firm worked with businesses, NGOs, and governments in the U.S., South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Australia and other countries.

His ideas

Toffler explains, "Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest. Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone." Toffler also states, in Rethinking the Future, that "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

In his book The Third Wave Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of 'waves' – each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside.
• First Wave is the society after agrarian revolution and replaced the first hunter-gatherer cultures.
• Second Wave is the society during the Industrial Revolution (ca. late 1600s through the mid-1900s). The main components of the Second Wave society are nuclear family, factory-type education system and the corporation. Toffler writes: "The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy."
• Third Wave is the post-industrial society. Toffler would also add that since the late 1950s most countries are moving away from a Second Wave Society into what he would call a Third Wave Society. He coined lots of words to describe it and mentions names invented by him (super-industrial society) and other people (like the Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, technetronic age, scientific-technological revolution), which to various degrees predicted demassification, diversity, knowledge-based production, and the acceleration of change (one of Toffler's key maxims is "change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways").

In this post-industrial society, there is a lot of diversity in lifestyles ("subcultures"). Adhocracies (fluid organizations) adapt quickly to changes. Information can substitute most of the material resources (see ersatz) and becomes the main material for workers (cognitarians instead of proletarians), who are loosely affiliated. Mass customization offers the possibility of cheap, personalized, production catering to small niches (see just-in-time production).

The gap between producer and consumer is bridged by technology using a so called configuration system. "Prosumers" can fill their own needs (see open source, assembly kit, freelance work). This was the notion that new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the prosumer. In some cases prosuming entails a "third job" where the corporation "outsources" its labor not to other countries, but to the unpaid consumer, such as when we do our own banking through an ATM instead of a teller that the bank must employ, or trace our own postal packages on the internet instead of relying on a paid clerk.

Aging societies will be using new (medical) technologies from self-diagnosis to instant toilet urinalysis to self-administered therapies delivered by nanotechnology to do for themselves what doctors used to do. This will change the way the whole health industry works.

Since the 1960s, people have been trying to make sense out of the impact of new technologies and social change. Toffler's writings have been influential beyond the confines of scientific, economic and public policy discussions. Techno music pioneer Juan Atkins cites Toffler's phrase "techno rebels" in Future Shock as inspiring him to use the word "techno" to describe the musical style he helped to create.

Toffler's works and ideas have been subject to various criticisms, usually with the same argumentation used against futurology: that foreseeing the future is nigh impossible. In the 1990s, his ideas were publicly lauded by Newt Gingrich.

The development Toffler believes may go down as this era's greatest turning point is the creation of wealth in outer space. Wealth today, he argues, is created everywhere (globalisation), nowhere (cyberspace), and out there (outer space). Global positioning satellites are key to synchronising precision time and data streams for everything from cellphone calls to ATM withdrawals. They allow just-in-time (JIT) productivity because of precise tracking. GPS is also becoming central to air-traffic control. And satellites increase agricultural productivity through tracking weather, enabling more accurate forecasts.

Two major predictions of Toffler's – the paperless office and human cloning – have yet to be realized.

Also influenced Timothy Leary (see Info-Psychology; New Falcon Press, 2004)

Critical acclaim

Accenture, the management consultancy firm, has dubbed him the third most influential voice among business leaders, after Bill Gates and Peter Drucker. He has also been described in the Financial Times as the "world's most famous futurologist". People's Daily classes him among the 50 foreigners that shaped modern China.

Selected awards

He is the recipient of several prestigious prizes, including the McKinsey Foundation Book Award for Contributions to Management Literature, Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, and appointments, including Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

In late 2006, the Tofflers were recipients of Brown University's Independent Award.

Bibliography

Alvin Toffler co-wrote his books with his wife Heidi. A few of their well-known works are:

• Future Shock (1970) Bantam Books ISBN 0-553-27737-5
• The Eco-Spasm Report (1975) Bantam Books ISBN 0-553-14474-X
• The Third Wave (1980) Bantam Books ISBN 0-553-24698-4
• Previews & Premises (1983)
• The Adaptive Corporation (1985) McGraw-Hill
• Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (1990) Bantam Books ISBN 0-553-29215-3
• War and Anti-War (1995) Warner Books ISBN 0-446-60259-0
• Revolutionary


Alvin Tofler said… (Download Pdf)

One Sure Method...

There is only one sure method of turning dreams into reality...












It;s by a process called... "Waking Up."

Lead employees through troublesome times ... be a serving leader

Which leadership style is needed to take people through difficult financial times?

There are three options...

The first option... although tempting, is to be an autocratic leader... taking charge, giving orders, following up, always in control... this will eventually lead to dependant employees, who will quickly loose initiative, creativity and self-worth.

Needless to say... this will be to the detriment of the company and/or team.

The second option is a leader with vision. A future focused leader, with a clear vision, mission and goal... a strategic thinker who can transform a company/team can lead the team to success.

But how do you encourage your team?

How do you inspire your workforce, to be involved, to realize the companies vision and to make it happen?

The third option might be the solution... become a “serving leader”.

To lead also means to serve.

A leader that serve is also a leader that will influence.

To have influence doesn’t come by itself, nor does it come with the title “Leader”.

Serving leaders like Jesus Christ, Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela did have an influence on the worlds history.

The new theory of leadership is not your strong autocratic leadership skills... It is the willingness to serve, to be a part of the team to respect your employees, to ask for their input, to be able to trust their judgement, and to give them the chance to impress you. You just might be surprised if you do.

In difficult economic times, company survival depends on all parties to be involved. To have a clear vision and a serving leader who can lead by example, who is willing to go the extra mile.

Have you got what it takes to be a serving leader?