photo: ALsocme

Okay, Cubicle Warriors, here’s the deal: Your manager just gave you the assignment to speak to an all-department (or all-hands!) meeting to describe an initiative that you’re working on for the team. Worse, you get to explain everything in ten minutes.

Gulp.

You’ve seen these presentations, haven’t you. PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide (or Keynote!) with death by a thousand bullet points. And a speaker to match. Five slides planned out — per minute! And a presentation that goes for twenty minutes and is, quite frankly, boring as hell.

Well, you can do this — and make it semi-interesting to boot. Well, as interesting as a corporate presentation can be, of course. All it takes is to follow the four steps outlined here. And follow one rule.

Let’s take a look.

The One Rule

Here’s the primary rule: The shorter the time to speak, the higher the level of information given. If you have an hour, you can talk about 27 things or something. You don’t talk about 27 things with ten minutes to present; you talk about five. Or less.

The shorter the time to speak, the higher the level of information given.

The four steps

1. Provide the goal(s) for the work

You can’t just stand up and start talking about what the work is about. No one — especially to people outside the department — knows what the work is much less the goal of the work. Nor will they spend any time trying to figure it out from your presentation.

So spell it out: The goal of this work is to improve the cycle time for delivery of the widget product to the customer from five days to two days.

Now the audience can tell where you are trying to get to with the work.

If you only have ten minutes, give them just the highest level measurable goal. If you have an hour, you can give them a few smaller goals as well. The goal portion of the presentation, though, should be one of the shorter elements of your talk. Not the majority.

2. Tell the story of reaching the goal

As I tell people in my SMART Goals and Performance Review products, every goal has a story. It has to have a story — how will you reach the goal? Managers don’t just throw a goal out there; they think they have a way to reach that goal that is both reasonable and attainable.

Your obligation in your presentation, then, is to tell this story about how you plan to achieve the goal. The story is the interesting part of the presentation. The story is what ties the work activity to the business result of the goal.

Will you interview 100 customers to discover what would make your process better? What examples from the interviews pertain here?

Will you upgrade your current IT system to the latest version to get the whiz-bang features you’ve been missing? Boring, unless you can tie that feature to how it will make your work better and easier.

The hero’s journey is the classic story of our time — and your story about your work as well. Describe your work as a hero’s journey and your presentation will be well-received.

Every goal has a story. Tell yours.

3. What is the current status?

If you’re done with your work, tell the results. If you are still in the middle — or beginning — of the work, tell your status.

“We’ve interviewed 25 of the 100 customers planned” and discovered exciting things.

“We’ve negotiated the upgrade contract and are currently gathering requirements to help our customers get quicker delivery.”

If you have an hour, spend more time on status. If you have ten minutes, talk about the big deliverable and where you are in the timeline and be done.

4. Tell people how they can help

Help is a good thing. Especially if you can get additional helps from the people you are doing the presentation for. Help them connect with how they can help you complete your work — and help themselves at the same time.

Will this work make their life at work easier? Then explain what they can do to help you help them.

Will this work help them help their customer? Show them what they can do to help get them to that point.

You need the call to action to engage the audience at the end. And no one does this in those ten-minute presentations. It’s a big miss.

The big ending

In the end, you know, the audience wants you to stay on schedule (“I’m like soooooo ready for lunch; would you please shut up!”) and not be boring. Honestly, the audience’s expectations in these big group meetings is very low. There are low expectations here because most of the presentations go over the time limits and have five thousand bullet points in them.

Did I say they were boring? Yes, that too.

So tell them the goal of the work, tell the story of how you are reaching that goal, give them a quick status of where you are in that story, and provide them concrete ways they can help themselves by helping you in your work.

Your coworkers will love you for it.

What’s the best — and worst — business presentation you’ve heard at work?

photo: VFS Digital Design

Another blog’s (a food blog!) writer asked the work question of how to delegate a task. I did this answer and then thought that if it was good enough for a comment on that web site, it was certainly good enough to share. Here’s the comment:

Once you make the decision something can be delegated, do the following:

1. Delegate the task to the person who can best do the task.

Give to people’s strengths, not their weaknesses. Don’t give a planning task delegation to a person who hates to plan.

2. Completely describe the end result of the task being delegated.

If you can’t describe the end state, you are only confusing the communication. “We need a competitive analysis of our product compared to these three competitors, X, Y, and Z. We need to compare features, price, market share, and advertising methods. We need this by Friday.”

3. Tell the person the format of the end deliverable.

For the above, do you want it in text (e.g., Word) or a spreadsheet? PowerPoint? Verbal presentation? Nothing sucks bigger than creating a 20-page Word document, going to the person giving you the task and then that person saying, “Oh. I wanted it in a spreadsheet.” Yeah, sucks.

4. Prototype, prototype, prototype.

Here’s the deal: No matter how clear you think you are in the delegation, you’re not clear. Don’t care who you are, what you have in your head is not the picture in the other person’s head. It won’t match no matter how good you think you communicate. Thus, tell the person to do ONE thing with what was just delegated.

For example, if you want your information back in a spreadsheet, have that person create the spreadsheet with all the row and column labels and fill in two lines with real information. Then review it with that person to insure everyone is on the same track.

Most likely, you will catch different interpretations of what you just delegated. And, most likely, the person taking on the task will have great ideas on how your task could be done better — format, information, or method of delivery. It makes the entire deliverable that much better. So prototype. You’ll be happy you did. And so will the person completing the task.

That’s my $1.50′s worth!

photo: _sarchi

Here’s the situation: you’ve been running your day as you have for the last x-amount of time. Then all of a sudden, the rules change. In my consulting case, the policy towards email retention changed. It requires one to rethink how to process email because the structure of files the company now provides is different than it was before. The retention rules changed as well, because companies don’t want lots of email floating around in discovery mode to help prove a prosecutor’s case.

So if you don’t adjust how you process your email, you will drive yourself crazy trying to do your email workflow the same way you’ve always done it when the email structure is no longer anything like what it was before the change.

It requires a thoughtful rework of your workflow. Do you rethink your workflow when the rules change?

photo: Ethan Hein

Recently, I had a conversation with a person who works for a company that has had complete job security. Now, though, sites are being closed, layoffs are happening and he’s worried about if this company is still the place to work.

The first step if you are worried about your job is to get your resume in order so that if you decide it is time to leave, you can pull the trigger and have the most important document ready for your job search. The problem with this person? He hasn’t updated his resume. In ten years.

Imagine him now having to construct a resume from thin air, staring at the computer screen with that blank page waiting for electrons to fill. Waiting for the key components of the resume beyond the employment history — your business results, actions taken to get those business results, and your job skills in an easy place to view.

You can see him hours and hours doing this task. Then, the most important part, failing to get interviews because the resume just doesn’t cut it.

Job search skills are the least used by all of us because we use them so little. It’s not like we use our job search skills — resume building, business networking, phone interviews and face-to-face interviews — like we use Microsoft Office. Or Facebook.

The job search skill to keep current

Updating your resume is a job search skill that needs consistent attention. Always having that resume ready with the most current skills and business results is the one job search skill you need to be using.

My suggestion? Update your resume once a quarter. You’re already updating your goals for your performance review once a quarter, right? Ahem…right? So update your resume at the same time with those results.

Too detailed a resume is a blessing, not a curse

There is a school of thought out there that says your resume should be concise. A study of presenting your skills and results in a finite amount of space that is easy to read and uses powerful language.

That would, for the most part, be true.

But the concise study of your skills and results is something you build when you create your resume for submission to a job posting. NOT when you update your resume with your latest results.

What is true is that it is far easier to cut out material from something when you have a focus to use — like a specific job description — than it is to try and remember what it was that you did that so awesomely fit the job description in front of you. Especially with business results presented with numbers.

When you are updating your resume, then, just put in all of your business results for the quarter and the projects you completed. Someday that ridiculous project you just completed at work that you thought was entirely irrelevant to your career will become yet another nugget in the story of you meeting your dream job description and being able to prove you can do that work.

Calendar your resume updates

Put those quarterly resume update dates down on your calendar right now for the entire year.

And in case you don’t have that appointment to update your performance goals for the year, you can add that one on your calendar at the same time.

Build your resume. Keep it up-to-date. Be ready to move knowing your skills and results are now available to use to start a new job search.

And if you want a resume review, click the link for the Cube Rules Resume Review.

photo: quinn.anya

A key to success on the job is a task management system that works for you. Whether that task management system is a methodology like Getting Things Done or a 25-notes-on-the-whiteboard approach that you invented, knowing your workload and your work inventory is key to accomplishing your tasks.

Until it all gets out of whack. Then you feel overwhelmed. Maybe intimidated. And you stop completing tasks because you bounce from one thing to another listening to the fast and the furious about what to do next. You get paralyzed.

Okay, well maybe you don’t get paralyzed. But I do. I lose my way and it takes a while to get the mojo back. Every time I go down that dark lane, I always find it is because I fail to do three things with my task management system. Take a look at my failings and learn from them. I do.

Consistency is the key to your task management system

None of us like to follow a structure all of the time, but the rules you have about your task management system need consistent following. If your system says to open up email the first thing in the morning and process it, then that is what you should do. (By the way, there are tons of pundits out there that tell you to NOT check email first thing on the job in the morning, but I’m too afraid of bombs falling from the overnight hours. Thus, [pullquote position="right"]I check my email first thing on the job, thank-you-very-much.[/pullquote])

If your task management system says to write your to-do’s from your meeting right after the meeting is done no matter what, then that is what you should do.

When you don’t consistently follow your own rules for your tasks, you get into trouble in two ways:

• You don’t capture what you need to capture so you lose control over your task inventory
• If you are not consistent with executing your system, you never find out where your system has friction preventing you from doing your best work

Consistently work your task management system so you don’t get unhinged and you can analyze what works for you. And what doesn’t work for you so you can change it.

Pause to review your work

In the Getting Things Done methodology that I follow for my tasks, David Allen talks about two dimensions of task management — control and perspective. If you don’t have control, you will never have perspective of your work. If you don’t gain perspective, you will never know if you are working on the right stuff.

Reviewing your tasks, your projects, and what you want to focus on consistently (there is that word again) allows you to prioritize your work, to see what no longer needs doing, and shows you the traps coming up on your schedule if they are not addressed today. That’s perspective.

Whether you review your work weekly, daily, or every two hours doesn’t make much difference to me. The key is to review your task lists, ensure you have all of your work inventory down and out of your head, and gain perspective about what is important right now.

A plan for when it all goes to hell

[pullquote]Did you know I have a task category called “Panic Mode?” I do.[/pullquote] You know those days where you walk in the door thinking everything is fine? Then you open your email to discover multiple crisis situations that need dealing with and you have meeting after meeting after meeting (after meeting) and in two hours you are completely out of whack? Yeah. Those days.

You need a task plan for those days. It’s how I came up with the Panic Mode category. When I walk into those situations, I essentially go for a couple of hours and then I pause for fifteen minutes and then write down everything that is in my head, work or not. Everything. It’s a mind dump. Get it all on paper — I don’t even use my electronic systems — I just get it out of my head.

Then, when I can see the ten or fifteen things that are getting my attention, I can look at the list and prioritize what can get done first and what I can control.

That process gets me back to a safe place. A place where I’m not weaving down the highway, flirting with the yellow line and the ditch. Getting control back in those situations is key to not going crazy.

I don’t want you to go crazy. Plan for what you should do when you have those crazy days at work. You’ll be glad you did.

Task management is fundamental to your success on the job

Having a complete inventory of your work is a necessary evil for success in your work. Unless you are clear in the commitments you have for your work, you will always have surprises and ticked off people coming in on your day.

When your task inventory gets out of whack, it’s usually one of these three tenets of task management at the root cause of the problem.

What’s your best way to deal with keeping your work inventory up-to-date?

Fastener (Fast) is our greyhound that we just adopted from the racing track. As her transitional foster home Mom noted: “Fast is racing to retirement.” Yup.

You know what the best defense is for the risk of getting laid off? One year’s take home pay in the bank.

You’ll never remove the risk of a layoff. Job security is a myth. Even if you are consistently adding job skills to your resume, getting great reviews, and have confidence in your ability, getting laid off is a blow. Getting laid off with no savings in the bank quickly removes all those job skills, reviews and confidence — instead, desperation starts to grab hold.

And desperation is job search death. Hiring managers can see desperation a mile away. Desperation impacts your family and other relationships. It quickly starts a downward spiral in a job search.

You don’t want to be desperate when searching for a job (and I know many other there are desperate to find work).

Avoid desperation

The only way to avoid desperation in a job search is money in the bank. And not 401(k) or IRA money. No, savings.

Right now, getting to one year’s savings in the bank is very hard to do for most of us. I get that. I’m not there either. Nor can you save a year’s take-home pay in a year. People have those regular things called bills to pay and food to buy.

But you can make it a goal to get one month’s take-home pay in the bank this year. Figure out your take home pay, add in a good chunk more for a COBRA payment to maintain health care and then figure out how much to save monthly between now and the end of the year to get one month’s take-home pay in the bank.

And if you already have one month’s pay in the bank, get another. Saving that amount per month is desperation insurance. Insurance that desperation won’t impact your job search in the event you get laid off.

Your business results drive your ability to get better performance reviews, job opportunities and the resulting income that comes from both. Yet, too many of us fail to track our business results and when we get to crunch time — filling out that self-review for performance or updating our resume — our business results are nowhere to be found.

Just think about the last time you had to write your performance review. You sit down, stare at the goals you and your manager agreed to long ago and then wonder what you’ll write that has any semblance of numbers to report, accomplishments and their importance displayed or the ability to show examples of where your work made a difference.

Generalizations don’t cut it — the manager can’t defend your work without numbers and the manager, frankly, won’t be tracking your goals and accomplishments.

And don’t get me started on tracking business results for resumes…

You need to decide how to track these accomplishments. Here are three ways to do just that.

1. Report your results weekly through your status report

Yeah, I know, status reports are the red-headed stepchildren of sophisticated business reporting. Here’s the deal: they work. Why? Because once a week, you need to distill your weeks work into accomplishments that can be measured and agreed upon by others.

Maybe it’s one thing that was accomplished — but it was done. Weekly, it shows your manager you are accomplishing great work. And, oh-by-the-way, gives you a clear record of your accomplishments to take into your performance review writing.

2. Schedule a quarterly review update

Here you put on your calendar a date and time when you formally review your business goals and accomplishments and record them for your performance review and resume file.

Maybe weekly is too much and too granular for you. But more than a quarter apart makes it more difficult to remember those accomplishments and grab the numbers that prove it.

3. Record the accomplishments during your task management review

It is imperative that you have a way of tracking your tasks so that you always have a way of determining your inventory of work. You can flip that around as well. Since you have an inventory of completed tasks, you can review them and determine your business results as you go.

The key to this method is to ensure you can report your completed tasks (most task management programs allow for this) and then get the numbers to support the accomplishment. The completed task doesn’t give the business result; the business result is the benefit to the group your work was done for to help them in their work.

When you manage your career — and income — it is up to you to market yourself. The way to market yourself is to provide good results from your work. And the ability to prove it.

No more staring at a blank page of a performance review — or resume — to write about your results. Follow one of these three methods and you’ll be editing the excess out instead.

One day late…writing this on a Sunday at O’Hare, waiting for my international flight for the work week…and looks like I’ll miss the coming snow storm at home on Monday night.

Enjoy your week, wherever you may be.

Let me ask you a simple, yet complicated, question. Have you ever received work goals from your manager that you thought you could attain? Goals that were reasonable, measurable, and were able to be attained from your own work?

Looking back on a (very) long career, I’d say no. Or very rare.

When I was still an FTE and not consulting as I am now, I started to push back on the goals that I thought were not attainable. Things like “team” goals. No matter how hard I personally worked in attaining that goal, if the rest of the team did just an average job at the goal, it was rated “satisfactory.” Which is great if what you were doing was “satisfactory” work to attain the goal. If you were doing “exceeds expectations” work to attain the team goal, it was all wasted effort and time because the rest of the team didn’t do the “exceeds expectations” work.

And, oh-by-the-way, that “satisfactory” rating on your team goal dragged your overall rating down toward average as well, making it that much harder to get that higher rating — and salary increase with a higher bonus.

Good times.

Here’s the deal

Most people won’t push back on their goals. They will talk the goals through, think about it, but if the goal isn’t attainable, not reasonable, not measurable or can’t get achieved from just their own work, they roll over and accept the goal. And get the performance review to match.

Corporate systems are not designed nor implemented to evaluate individual performance (outside of most sales organizations). At the very best, the performance is measured against a department. Or a budget. But not to an individual.

Unless you, personally, can track your progress against your goals by being able to measure your work results, you abdicate your ability to influence your performance review. Essentially, your manager can write whatever he or she wants on your performance review and you have nothing to show on why that opinion is anything other than an opinion.

Or, what you track makes no difference

But let’s say you can track your performance. Let’s say you do have numbers that show your results. But your manager ignores them anyway, writes what the manager wants to write, and your pushback means nothing.

That’s not the same thing as the manager just writing anything the manager wants. In the example where you can’t track your work, you are playing the “match expectation” game by getting higher ratings through your personality, ability to bond with the manager or whatever to get the rating. It’s certainly not about measuring results. You may want to operate in that environment; I’ll pass. All Cubicle Warriors would pass on that as well.

In the case where you can track your performance, point that out to your manager and the manager still won’t take that into account, what you have is a bad manager. Most likely a poor management team standing behind and poorly supporting that manager as well. 

But now you know.

Objectively knowing you have a poor manager, or a manager who agrees with you but can’t override the politics of the performance management culture, or a manager who embraces measuring results of an employee’s work makes a world of difference in what actions you take next. Should you stay in the department? Stay in the company? Work with the manager? Not work with the manager?

You need to know. The only way to know is if you set up your goals right the first time (which gives you the first big clue about your manager and your results) and then see how those goals and your business results are measured on your performance review.

If your SMART goals are not really smart, you won’t be able to be smart about your work either. You’ll just have your opinions and feelings about how it is going and those have never influenced a performance review.

Smart goals drive performance. They also drive your ability to see the type of management environment you are working in while earning your salary. Not getting the SMART goals smart makes it harder to empirically understand where you stand in the organization and with your manager.

Tighten up your SMART Goals

Really make them SMART. And if your manager won’t get them to be within your control and have a way to measure your specific performance against the goals, well, that tells you something about management now, doesn’t it?

Check out Killer SMART Goals for the Cubicle Warrior.