The Cranky Middle Manager Show #102 Framework for Team Success- Ed Oakley
The Cranky Middle Manager Show #102 (MP3 17.2MB 37:32Min)
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Greetings fellow toilers. Today we talk to Ed Oakley, Author of Leadership Made Simple,Practical Solutions to your Greatest Management Challenges
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Show Notes
0:00 Welcome to the show. You’re a middle manager if you’ve ever been caught in an email pincer movement….admit it, denial is futile. Today’s show is dedicated to Shabdrung Ngwang Namgyel, the Confucius of Bhutan. Having a systemic framework means things almost run themselves…. like for 57 years.
3:25 The quote of the week is from Aristotle who said you should watch something from its beginnings…but as our guest will point out you have to sometimes work backwards….doing that without making people crazy is the trick.
6:01 Welcome Ed Oakley of Enlightened Leadership Solutions. How did a geek at HP get hooked on management and leadership? Why do smart people not know what they’re getting into?
8:58 Is Leadership really that simple? (check out my article on small l and Big L Leadership) There’s a hard part (measurable metrics, numbers, data) and the soft part (people, basically). The hard stuff is management, the soft stuff is leadership. Ed starts by telling us his own “Aha” moment…
12:16 Ed tells the story about his buddy Zack, and how nitpicking cost a company a great employee. So how do you go wrong helping to make things better? It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. The problem is not acknowledging what’s right.
15:45 The framework for come from the positive and solve the problems by using people in the room is:
- Start with the positive- what’s already working now?
- What’s causing our successes?
- What are we trying to accomplish?
- What are the benefits of achieving those objectives
- What can we do more/better/differently to get closer to our objective?
It’s all about looking forward, not looking back and blaming. Then we get some case histories… gotta love real-world application.
27:45 We hear all the time about WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) but Ed suggests starting from the outside (Customers, Others) in.
32:40 Ed Oakley recommends “Made To Stick” by the Heath Brothers.
Thanks for listening everyone. Don’t forget to check out The Working Week podcast as well….. Don’t let the weasels get you down.
July 17th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Wayne:
Great show as usual. If only I could plug my iPod ear buds into the ears of some of the people that took over my organization about 18 months ago and have proceeded to drive dozens of high performers away while breaking the effectiveness of one of the world’s most respected training organizations.
At the risk of sounding like one of those stuck in my ways people that are the bane of “change managers” sometimes “change” is not the right prescription. It is all well and good to believe that something is not working as well as it should, but the wrong solution is to bring in a “change management consultant” whose only real experience is having passed “Change Management 101″ and ask them to help fix the problem of recalcitrant, change resistant folks like me.
Perhaps if those consultants and take over artists had known about Ed’s step by step process and actually approached us to find out what was working already, things would have been different. Of course, that would have required them to do a bit more work and perhaps even check their egos at the door.
As it is, it is time for me to move on.
Wow - that really did sound bitter. Oh well, thanks for letting me vent.