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Thursday 28 June 2012

Change management tip - "Start, then strengthen"

Start then strengthenYou will massively improve your chances of successfully making changes in your workplace if you implement a simple and essential change first, then look to incorporate the more challenging elements later. In essence, "Start, then strengthen".

The temptation when assessing the scope of proposed changes is to correct all the known issues (major and minor) in the first iteration. Your thinking may be "I'm going to have spend a lot of time and energy convincing stakeholders to buy into these changes, it makes sense to try and fix everything as part of this project".

Before going down that path however, I advise you to consider the following:
1) Larger more complex projects/changes have more elements for detractors to criticise

Friday 22 June 2012

Exceed your boss' expectations, then ask for what you want

Exceed expectations
This may seem obvious, but the most important person to impress at work is your line manager (your boss). S/he is the one who has the biggest influence on what work you do, what (if any) bonus you're entitled to, whether you're deserving of a pay rise, what training the organisation will finance for you and so on. Your line manager is also the gate-keeper to more senior members of the organisation and likely a person with numerous contacts within the organisation and/or across the industry.

The only way to impress your boss is to clearly understand what s/he expects from you, then deliver work that exceeds those expectations. This applies to more than just the output itself ( e.g. exceeding your sales target), but also the way you deliver the output (e.g. the relationships you build with your coworkers, the processes you put in place etc.).