The Cranky Middle Manager Show #110 (MP3 14.5MB 31:30)

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Welcome to the show. Forgive the Old School cover art- I was feeling nostalgic for the early days of the show. Today we’re visiting with the author of Growing Great Employees , Erika Andersen. It’s a fun conversation and you’ll find something called, “camera check” which I think will go down in the annals of this show along with “dinosaur eggs” from Wally Bock and “Martha Steward was mean to a flight attendant and I busted her” by Judith Glaser.

Don’t forget to check out Cranky Middle Manager e-books at The Cranky Middle Manager Store. Especially, The Four Disciplines of Highly Effective, Leadership Exhibiting, Project Nailing, Cheese Moving Managers and the special added bonus, “100 Free Web Resources All Managers Need”

Show Notes

0:00 Welcome to episode 110. Sticking a finger in the wind, or just sticking your boss the finger, greetings.

This episode is dedicated to the Scythian queen Tamyris . Making a wine glass out of your opponent’s skull is not necessarily going to get past HR but it’s a pretty clear metric of success.

2:12 The quote of the week is from Benjamin Disraeli- “The fool wonders, the wise man asks”. Explains some of the bonehead questions I ask sometimes… just shows how smart I am.

4:15 Welcome Erika Andersen of The Simplest Things That Work blog. How did she get inspiration for the book?Turns out if you want something done you do it yourself. That also includes the blog, The Simplest Things. People’s business models are blowing up left center and right…. the world is changing.

9:23 It’s easy for us to moan about senior executives, but their job isn’t easy either. What are they seeing as the gaps in middle management? First, she sucks up by complimenting my question, then she gets down to the answer… Ask: What can we do to help?

12:00 So why don’t more managers get the training they need? The skills are do-able but we don’t always give people the need they help to succeed. Sometimes when we become managers we stop listening because we’re supposed to have all the answers. Yet why can’t we get anyone even at gunpoint to get help with listening? She tells a great story here, don’t miss it.

22:30 The skills we need at work are not that different from what we need in the rest of our lives but MAN is that tough. She introduces a great concept called The Camera Check- Imagine looking through a camera lens when giving feedback…what do you actually SEE them doing. I love this one.

28:00 Erika’s resources:

Nettie Hartsock- two weeks in a row she gets a mention…..

No big surprise, Phil Gerbyshak and Make it Great

and our friends at 800 CEO Read. (Hear our interview with Jack Covert here...)

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 9:14 am and is filed under Podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.