People Management 101

Getting into people management as a first-time manager is all about planning, learning, preparation, execution and reflection.

Getting into people management is probably one of the most coveted steps in anyone’s career. It is also the step met with the most anxiety and maybe sometimes fear. Many people usually describe it as hitting a wall. If you get into people management you need to change your whole paradigm. Most of the qualities and skills that made you successful as an individual contributor (IC) will not be entirely applicable in your new situation.

The goal of this article is to give you a framework for the first few weeks after becoming a people manager. It is about what you need to drop and what you need to develop when getting into people management.

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Efficient Meeting – How to Get the Most of a Meeting

Learn how to organize and host an efficient meeting in order to build your personal brand, lower costs and drive success in your organization.

Efficient meeting means a meeting on which the organizer is prepared, the participants know what is expected of them, there is a designated note taker. An efficient meeting saves time, money and energy and produces results, action items and drives the success of the organizations.

The average corporate employee spends between 35% and 50% of their time in meetings. Even more, they spend more and more time in meetings every year, compared to the previous. Unproductive meetings are estimated to waste a whopping $37 billion in the US alone.

The key to having productive, efficient meetings is in preparation, execution and follow-up. When you will host a meeting, you should spend time thinking about the format, participants and the topics that will be covered. During the meeting, you should steer the discussion towards the topics discussed and not let it slip. After the meeting, you should publish the outcome and follow up on the action items.

As simple as it may sound, the reality is not that easy. It takes a lot of experience, tools and discipline to organize and host a productive meeting. This article is going to give you high-level advice that comes from best practices in fortune 500 companies.

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Interview Skills – How to Prepare for the Big Interview

Master your interview skills, understand the interview purpose and process. Tips by a person who has excelled at interviews at two Fortune-500 companies.

Improving your interview skills is a crucial task on your professional productivity agenda. No matter if you like it or not, at some point of your life you would have to face the much dreaded interview process. Statistics shows that most of the executive level opportunities are not published publicly and are taken via referrals. But in 100% of the cases, you would have to face at least an HR specialist and a decision maker. This is called in interview.

Most obviously, if you are an extrovert and if you are able to “sell yourself” as a product, you would have advantage over the other candidates. But even if you are not, there are some steps that you could follow in order to increase your chances and crush the competition. In any case, this article is mostly targeted at the people that do not feel comfortable when facing an interview.

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Professional Productivity

The last pillar that I am going to cover is the professional productivity. Just like the case with personal optimization, here the idea is to do the things you do right. This is achieved by usually doing them faster, better, with fewer resources or higher quality. One of the definitions of productivity is “the effectiveness of productive effort as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input”. Or in other terms how to achieve better results with the same amount of effort.

The Four Pillars of Success: Professional Productivity
The Four Pillars of Success with emphasis on Professional Productivity

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