This is the third in a series of articles on management training.

Our group focused on a second aspect of communication this week. As we discussed in previous sessions, communication has to be clear, specific and actionable. This week, we focused on finding out how your audience was receiving the information.

New managers often overlook this second aspect of communication. They focus on a one-size-fits all way of communicating and then get frustrated when some of their team does not understand what was asked of them.

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This is the second in a series of articles on management training.

As managers, we all have that moment of reflection, whether we will admit it to anyone, where we take some time to be honest with ourselves and begin to grade ourselves as a manager.

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This is Part One of a series of articles.

I am currently working with a team of new manager candidates and I wanted to share some of the management training program we go through over the next few weeks.

The first thing we discussed when we got together was what they were looking to accomplish with this training. What did they want to get out of it? I asked that because one of the first lessons of management is making sure that you have a goal or objective in mind for all that you do.

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I was calling the other day to set up some travel and when I dialed I got a real voice versus an IVR.The funny thing was, I checked to make sure I dialed the rightnumber.

Now how funny is that. We are so accustomed to getting a recording (you have reached…) or a support line, (please enter your account #) that when we actually get someone it makes us feel like we did something wrong.

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Let’s talk about why. So often we spend our valuable time with these questions: why do things happen? why do we do certain things? why don’t we achieve all of our goals? This list goes on and on.

As we ask ourselves these questions, focusing on what we should do, and never set out a plan to actually accomplish something and follow through on it. We spend more time examining what never happened.

We are successful or not because of the actions we execute. When we choose to examine our success or failure, we find that the real cause is the “why.” When we have a strong “why,” we have a better chance to succeed. [read more...]