Stop, Look and Listen

Terri Griffith in her book,The Plugged-In Manager provides an easy-to-understand framework for plugging in, explained by these three core practices:

  1. Stop-Look-Listen: What does your data say? What do you already know that will help you with this project?
  2. Mixing: How do you balance your available resources?
  3. Sharing: How can you achieve better results by integrating your choices with other team members?

As organizations continue to get flatter and flatter, we continue to put more and more pressure on the few left in middle management. It’s not just the personnel either. That may be the easy part. Now, we are being faced with everyone becoming customer facing, the depth of customer penetration within in the ranks is increasing at a rapid wait. The one answer that so many of us fallback to is technology. And, that is also changing at a rapid rate. So what does a manager have to do?

Teri did a podcast with me a while back and I found myself using the material more and more lately. The podcast,  Are your Managers managing Technology? Or… ..is technology managing answered many of these questions. This is a transcription of the podcast.

This is a very “Lean” conversation.

About: Terri Griffith, Ph.D. helps people and organizations work with technology. As a Professor of Management at Santa Clara University (Silicon Valley), Terri helps mix together the technology of work (everything from telepresence to the size and type of tools a crew would use to build a fence), the way we organize to do this work (virtual teams, collaborative leadership, hiring and pay plans), and the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the people we work with.