Do you supervise people?

Supervising other people is an important responsibility. The success in doing it comes from really paying attention. In the military, the best leaders I had were those who acted as if their primary job was taking care of their people and doing everything they could to help their people get recognition and get promoted.

The worst leaders were definitely those who felt important because they had been chosen to be in charge. Rather than trying to help ALL of their people, they were quite selective and chose critically who to support and who to sink.

Do you communicate to your people, on a daily basis, that they are important to you? Can you do it with your actions and not by having to say it? Being genuine is really the key.

It is definitely worth taking time out every once in a while to reflect on how you are doing as a supervisor and reflecting on the qualities you recognize as being valuable.

Stay warm!

When you are NOT leading the meeting

On the same theme, I want to address meeting participants. Over the past two days I went to far too many meetings. I can't wait until Monday when school starts and I can do some real work. Anyhow... suppose you are in a meeting as a participant, look around the room and count the number of participants (let's stick with the algebra theme). If there are x participants, then you should not, in most instances, participate more than 1/x of the discussion time. In the meetings over the past few days a few people dominated the discussions pretty much just to hear themselves talk. In most meetings it is better to sit quietly listening and thinking. In the few instances when you talk try to make it well thought out, meaningful, and brief.

The Art of Leading a Meeting

I am sure there are lots of books written about how to lead a meeting and many of us can provide tips for others, but there is a particular hint I would like to share today.

The deal is this. If there is x amount of time for the meeting and y things to be covered, then we should keep our eye on the clock and every x/y minutes move the meeting to the next topic.

For example, today 9 different committees met on campus from 10 to noon. I ran one of the meetings and when we got started, I wrote on the white board that the first topic would be limited in time from 10:00 to 10:30, the second from 10:30 to 11:00, etc. Our group got really involved in the first discussion and we easily could have spent the whole time on it, however, we moved on to our other goals and finished a little ahead of time. Later in the day, a person from another committee was bemoaning the fact that they had 6 topics and did not even complete the first.

I am not trying to toot my own horn here. The reason I bring this up is that too often, way too often, the meetings I attend do not get moved along and the work does not get done efficiently and more and more meetings are planned.

I think you get the point.

Canada was awesome. We snowshoed 5 miles per day in rugged wilderness. The sauna each night felt great.

Professional Development

One of the most rewarding parts of my year come when I take a few days to fly away to some national workshop or conference that is about improving myself as a professional. Some people look at these sorts of conferences as a nuisance or disruption to their lives and thus avoid them whenever possible. Not me, these events energize my beyond belief. I take along my leather bound "best ideas" journal and usually fill 15-20 pages with new ideas before I come home. This, plus the opportunity to meet new people who share my interests and often meet acquaintances from past events.

TBL: When you get a chance to attend a professional development conference, look at as an opportunity worth jumping at.

PS - Thanks Jim P for the great comments to the last entry. I recommend everyone goes and takes a look.

PPS - I'm heading to Canada to Wenger's cabin for a few days of snowshoeing, sauna, and beer. I'll write again at the end of the week.

Email Log Jams

Last night while watching TV I had my laptop, well on my lap, and I was going through my inbox. With all the spam deleted I still had more than 150 messages. They fell into 4 categories: 1) already read/answered/to be moved to the file cabinet; 2)new and need responses; 3)read a long time ago and haven't yet responded; 4)came in a long time and I haven't even read yet.

It is these last two categories that really bother me. I know how it happens - I get an email, read it don't have time to answer, and before I get back to it, I have received a bunch more emails and it gets buried. But really this isn't a good excuse.

Put simply, not reading or replying to an email in a timely manner is just plain unprofessional regardless of the excuse.

This is something I need to improve on immediately. Do you?

David Bodanis

I am going to take this opportunity to introduce you to an author - David Bodanis. Bodanis has written 4 books. I've completed one and am half way through two others. This guy has an incredible way of writing so that you understand what he is saying. The two books that I recommend are "E=mc^2: A biograpy of the world's most famous equation" and "Electric Universe".

Here is the problem, most of the readers of this blog are engineers. As such you carry a burden through life; people think you know everything! And when a non-engineer asks you a question, to which you reply "I don't know", their response is, "what do you mean you don't know!. I thought you were an engineer". As all of you know this can be disconcerting.

Well, Bodanis offers us some help. In a couple of short books he gives us an excellent understanding of two things that we probably should know. So, head off to Amazon and get yourself a couple of good books.

TBL is Back

Happy New Year!

I hope you had a great holiday season. I sure did. I have been noticeably absent for the past 3 weeks and I apologize. I really have no valid excuse. The new year is upon us and I am a person who does evaluate the past and get geared up for the future during this time of year. Being more consistent on publishing TBL is on my list. So please continue to check in ocassionally to see if there is anything here of any value to you.

P.S. My book count for the year was 54. Angie made a last week push to get to 92 (her first time under a hundred this century).

Stay tuned.