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Today Wayne Turmel talks with Management Craft’s Lisa Haneberg about her new book, Hip and Sage. We also give a little love to Ning and King George the III. Let’s see how many Google/Bing searches have those two words in the same sentence. Always breaking new ground here…..

Lisa Haneberg retruns for yet more good conversation and laughs.

Don’t forget to get a copy of the Cranky Middle Manager book of quotes for your team or the manager who needs a laugh!

Show Notes

0:00 Welcome to the show, gang. This is the show if you ever feel like you used to be good at the job and were once the smartest and/or youngest person in the room. Lisa Haneberg has a book for what ails you. Also, we dedicate the show to King George III of England.  Give him a little love this July 4th.

3:06 The quote of the week is from Voltaire. Are you wiser, or just too old and  tired to scandalize anyone?

4:50 You can join the Cranky Middle Manager family any number of ways. The word for this kind of contact by the way is tweetfacelinkblogging. It’s a verb. Look it up.  Here’s how to reach me on ,Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, by the way.

5:30 Welcome back Lisa Haneberg, author of Hip and Sage: Staying Smart, Cool and Competitive in the Workplace. Ever feel like everyone knows stuff you don’t? You’re not alone. Getting old isn’t great, but there’s only one alternative and let’s assume that’s not an option. The biggest thing most of us have to deal with is how we communicate. Do we need to train the kids to communicate and tolerate meetings like us or do we have to think about what and how we talk to them?

8:47 What is hip? What is sage? Hip is being open to the possibilities of the new. Sage is the wisdom as a leader and how we use all that stuff we try.  Here’s the good news, not everyone needs to Twitter. You all need to know what the heck it is. That’s the difference. Here’s my take on Twitter: watching what was going on with Iran was cool. There are also morons who don’t deserve to be part of the conversation.

12:57 Is texting and the rest dumbing down the language or evolving it? Should we complain about the bad spelling or concentrate on the content and speed? Should we teach people to endure bad meetings or quit holding useless meetings?

16:04 You can worry so much about not “wasting time” that we lose the human connections that make relationships work.  One of the things that helps is sites like Ning. Two Ning sites you should check out:

The Employee Engagement Network

Management Central

Seriously, check them out and learn the potential. If the company won’t pay for collaboration tools, these are free and they work.

Lisa says to ignore the IT department. She said it. I don’t want the lawsuits.

22:10 I wouldn’t admit it to Lisa but she’s my hero on this stuff. She tells us about a couple of other tools including RSS feeds and a cool site called  Wetpaint.

Resources

Check out Tavis Smiley for his ability to ask great questions.

I’m very excited to announce that today launched the first in my new monthly series of columns on BNET (okay, BNET UK).

The topic of remote management is becoming more and more prevalent, and i believe that it will be the number one new challenge (the old challenges haven’t changed since Adam and Eve met “did not meet expectations” on their first performance reviews) for managers.

Please check out the article here. I’d appreciate comments on the post, but more importantly let me know what topics you’d like to read about. What are YOUR challenges? What tools do you like? I’d especially like to know, what are the problems you see that your company just doesn’t seem to get but will bite them in the tush if they don’t get a grip on it?

It’s been a crazy week already, and I’m amazed that in two days, two cool pieces of web-press have showcased the work we do at Greatwebmeetings.com

The first is from my buddy and Cranky Middle Manager guest Vince Thompson (hear his interview here) who interviewed me for the cool business site Smart Planet. (Click here to read the Cranky/Greatwebmeetings interview). Thanks Vince, and you have a great blog, although Pure Genius might be a tad overboard. I mean, if it’s about me it’s wildly inaccurate and if it’s about you, well seems a tad immodest, but what do I know?

The second is a recommendation on the Web Conferencing Council blog, where my book, 6 Weeks to a Great Webinar was named Book of the Month. Much thanks!

 

 Standard Podcast [33:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today the Cranky Middle Manager, Wayne Turmel, welcomes colleague Dan Bobinski back to the show. We’ll talk about passion driven teams, motivation and the war of 1812. Just another day here on the show….

Dan Bobinski makes another visit to the show. Read his column on Management Issues if you haven’t yet.

Show Notes

0:00 Welcome to the show. Today we dedicate the show to Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory, 7th president of the Unites States. Small motivated teams can accomplish great things against odds. It helps if the enemy is arrogant, dressed in red and standing in a straight line.

3:04 the quote of the week is from one of my heroes, Michel de Montaigne. The more certain someone is of something, the odds are he’s a blithering idiot. I paraphrase of course……

4:00 Welcome Dan Bobinski back to the show. How do you create “passion driven teams”. This is a team that is motivated by the work at hand, everyone wants to accomplish the same task. Are they working out of momentum or because the manager pushes. One of these works better. Oh, and Dan has dogs :-)

10:00 Why do good people become micro-managers? When you’re a subject expert but unsure how to manage people, you try to control everything.

15:00 What is motivation and how the heck do you get it without manipulation? Is it really motivation, or is it just removing the things that get in the way of successfully doing the task? Dan takes us through an example with sales people.

20:00 I get to give you my definition of the difference between “innovation” and “change”. Getting people’s buy-in to a change is one of the hardest things you can do.  To move people to change you need three things:

• focus
• expectation of the “aha”
• attention density

Oh, and dishes of candy do wonders. Really.

26:00 Over the years are the complaints about management changing? Dan has noticed, and Management Issues agrees, that people are concentrating more on human than organizational issues. Is this a permanent change?

Dan can be reached on Twitter by the way @danbobinski. While you’re at it, you can find me there at @greatwebmeeting

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You can find him on Facebook as well