The Cranky Middle Manager 128 Slacker Manager David Zinger
The Cranky Middle Manager #128 (MP3 12.8MB 26:35 Min)
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2 Quick Announcements:
1) The new Cranky Middle Manager website is up and functional. Take a look at www.crankymiddlemanager.com
2) We have plenty of room in our webinar: “Managing Remote Employees- Using Webmeetings to Keep Them Engaged”.
9PM January 29th ( Central time, US), 2 PM January 30th (Melbourne Australia). No telephone dial-in, just get on line using Dimdim. Drop me an email to enroll and I’ll give you the details.
Show Notes
0:00 Welcome to the show. You’ll know quickly enough if this is the right place for you to be. We dedicate this episode to Eris… the Goddess of Strife. Wish I’d known about her when I was giving my last boss her nickname……..
3:50 The quote of the week is from Lao Tzu…. why do we care what others think? Because we do….. this one is for me.
4:30 Welcome David Zinger from his own blog as well as The Slacker Manager (full disclosure, they named me slacker of the month or something… I think it’s meant as an honor). He tells us a little about how he and Phil Gerbyshak came to run the joint.
8:00 What are the things his readers are most concerned about? Time management, of course, work life balance and dealing with tough employees. It’s hard sometimes to have a new take on things…that’s why he ( and we for that matter) bring in as many voices and perspectives as they can. The latest cycle is employee engagement… why does it matter and why should I stay the course?
13:50 What are some of the things companies do that dis-engage their employees from customers? The wrong program will do that… NOTE: Not everyone loves FISH! But what does connect people? Well, the single biggest connection is the human connection, which is you and me. Check out Jane Dutton’s research….
20:00 Some people are easier to energize- and stay energized by- than others to be sure. People’s engagement ebbs and flows naturally enough.
25:00 This week’s resources:
TED Talks.… we’ve plugged this one before but well worth checking out
January 24th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Greg, hiding from his bosses somewhere in Europe, sent me this email and said I could post it….
Dear Wayne,
Lately I’ve been skimming through the CMM shows, and I realised why: the shows lately have been too much insightful and not enough irreverent. But given my favourite business author is Scott Adams, I guess that’s just my personal bias showing!
But that segues into my comment on the show with the slacker manager guy, which I skimmed through this morning. One of our HR folks attempted to trot out that trite FISH! crap with the group I was in a few years back while I was based in the US. Now, my comic-book philosophy about being in the workplace has always been “you don’t have to act seriously to take it seriously”. I mean, most of us are stuck there for a goodly proportion of the hours in our week and hence our life, and if work was so great that we just wanted to be there, they wouldn’t need to pay us, right? But though we’re all stuck there, there’s no need for us all to run around spending all day making it any more miserable than it needs to be. I work in a highly regulated industry, and the compliance police seem intent on killing any joy or enjoyment they come across. But I don’t buy that - we must take it seriously, not wander around with solemn looks on our dials.
So, back to the FISH! thing. When the HR person showed us the film, we were then asked how we “felt” about a workplace like that (maybe “employee feelings” were the theme that month in HR-land). I said, maybe it was because I’m a “furriner an’ all”, but if I ever saw such engineered hype and BS, I’d run a mile in the opposite direction. Kind of an asshole thing to say, in hindsight, but she did ask how it made me “feel”! I think that came up in your show: you can’t force that kind of stuff - you have to create the right environment, and let it grow on its own. And tangentially to being an asshole or not, forcing it is like what Bob Sutton calls “sham participation”.
This sort of sums it up for me….
Greg, I try to balance irreverence and being polite to my guests…. but I’m glad you’re hanging in there with us. As for FISH, i admit to feeling about it the same way I feel about New Year’s Eve….. If you need me i’ll be in my office- call me when it’s over.
WWT
April 29th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
[...] Big Ideas to Big Results- Michael Kanazawa and Robert Miles The Employee Engagement Network including David Zinger (you can hear his CMM interview here….) [...]