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How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

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Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#131
Judging by my experience over a number of years in industry, the most important aspect is to understand the cultural expectations of the people you are working with.

Working with a north-east US team can be wildly different than a Southeast US team, or a west coast US team. Let alone a Toronto CA team, vs Quebec, CA, or UK or Australia, or Germans, or Dutch or Poles, or Indians from New Delhi vs folks from Bangalore.

People work differently, and culture and communication is wildly different.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#132

Judging by my experience over a number of years in industry, the most important aspect is to understand the cultural expectations of the people you are working with. Working with a north-east US team can be wildly different than a Southeast US team, or a west coast US team. Let alone a Toronto CA team, vs Quebec, CA, or UK or Australia, or Germans, or Dutch or Poles, or Indians from New Delhi vs folks from Bangalore.…

This is really interesting to me, do you have any examples you can think of to illustrate this? Definitely something where I don't even know what I don't know, but it seems so important especially in recent times.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#134

Judging by my experience over a number of years in industry, the most important aspect is to understand the cultural expectations of the people you are working with. Working with a north-east US team can be wildly different than a Southeast US team, or a west coast US team. Let alone a Toronto CA team, vs Quebec, CA, or UK or Australia, or Germans, or Dutch or Poles, or Indians from New Delhi vs folks from Bangalore.…

This is really interesting to me, do you have any examples you can think of to illustrate this? Definitely something where I don't even know what I don't know, but it seems so important especially in recent times.

I mean, it's stereotypical, but if an Indian colleague drops a "kindly do the needful" on most Americans, that will be met with consternation and confusion.

The other big issue I've seen is around scheduling meetings with inappropriate lead times. I've come in too many times on monday mornings at 9 AM to see angry emails about not attending a meeting at 8 AM, when the meeting invitation was sent 2AM.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#135
post #66

A useful set of tips, but when I first became a manager, my biggest problem was thinking there was some magic formula to get the best out of my team. I was looking for a YAML config script, but human beings don’t work that way. Now, with a bit more experience, I spend more time listening to people and working out how I can help them with their specific need. As a sidenote, I hate the euphemisms “release” and “let go”…

I'm glad of hearing that. I was always surprised by the "let go" expression. It would be interesting what would happen in a conversation like "We have to let you go. – No need. I don't have to go anywhere".

In Spanish the term is "despedido". "despedir" is the action of saying good bye. The literal translation could be something like "good-bye'd".

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#137

Fan of the Marine Corps model: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/leadership.htm Some of them are painfully obvious, but these are sometimes absent when they shouldn't be. (I also suspect this is what Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr either draw from, or coincide with.)

Along those lines, I highly recommend "Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win" by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Especially the audiobook, as it is narrated by the authors.

In each chapter one of the authors tells a first person account of leadership on the battlefield, then they go on to relate that to business leadership with specific examples from their business consultations. Very engaging, and I think the leadership lessons they teach spot-on.

https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs/dp/B...

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#138

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Rather, it's a call to action to stop something I really, really hate about the web these days: popups over content, begging me to sign up for an email subscription. Whenever I'm reading a web page and one of these rude popups appears, I immediately close the browser tab and move on. If the authors are rude enough to interrupt me with an invitation to clutter my inbox, t…

It's because analytics say this gets more lead captures, but they rarely measure if the leads are fake just to make the things go away. In the end they are just looking at "conversion" metrics and the cost it took to drive that traffic. Longer term effects are hard to measure, and ad agencies and internal ad teams are measured for this month, not the future.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#139
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were a few differences you ran into?

Asians have massive respect for authority. This, in effect, mean that they won't ever say no to, or disagree with, their boss. I had to learn to ask open questions, because if they could say yes they would. They would still guess at what I wanted to hear and tell me that. I got told different things than other members of the management team, not because anyone was trying to deceive, but purely as a show of respect. M…

Curious why the servant leadership style didn't work for you and why you think that is because this is the approach I prefer as well but I'm young in my career.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#140

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Rather, it's a call to action to stop something I really, really hate about the web these days: popups over content, begging me to sign up for an email subscription. Whenever I'm reading a web page and one of these rude popups appears, I immediately close the browser tab and move on. If the authors are rude enough to interrupt me with an invitation to clutter my inbox, t…

It's because analytics say this gets more lead captures, but they rarely measure if the leads are fake just to make the things go away. In the end they are just looking at "conversion" metrics and the cost it took to drive that traffic. Longer term effects are hard to measure, and ad agencies and internal ad teams are measured for this month, not the future.

So, you think these people don't analyze whether adding these pop-ups brings actual traffic to their website, not just increases subscriptions? If it was "fake signups", why would people add their real email, and why would they click on the articles afterwards?
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