I spent my day at the Optus training centre in Melbourne today, quite a nice modern building with a lot of training rooms. It had a couple of TV’s running Foxtel which I can’t say I’ve seen before in other buildings I’ve visited, without going into boring interior design all in all it was sleek and semi-eye catching. Ok so Foxtel wasn’t the highlight but the building had all your other usual facilities and setup you’d expect to see at a training centre.

The company I work for gave us the opportunity to participate in Optus run training covering leading people through change. Our presenter, Kerrie Cottrill has a solid background in coaching and working with teams, I was in awe of her background and the brief significant events she went through to get where she is now. Fantastic at delivering the session also, Kerrie kept us engaged throughout the day and one of the most interesting techniques in her delivery was playing up beat and positive music when we were doing group sessions. No death by PowerPoint here!

One concept introduced to us was the decision making functions which are based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The two functions here are thinking and feeling. Based on Myers-Briggs, the function we exhibit shapes the way we make our decisions.

Thinkers are those that analyse the situation, they calculate, assess, look for flaws, tell it how it is, state the facts, use logic and use their head. They can come across as detached and can slap you from side to side – “That was a fantastic job Bob. Now let’s improve more”. They can be a facts and figures type person and stereotypically you can find quite a few of these individuals in senior management roles.

Feelers on the other hand use their heart. They consider others, are people focused, praise and encourage, use understanding, they are high on values, empathetic and subjective. They generally don’t want to upset people and seek harmony and balance. Feelers will approach people with more emotion than their thinking counterparts, if they see an under performer they will consider outside influences that might be affecting this individual and are they under stress? Is it a motivation issue we can address or a problem with team dynamics?

We were split into groups and asked what issues and concerns we foresee with thinkers and feelers working together, our group was made up of feelers. Some of the points we came up with where a higher risk of conflict due to misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Both thinkers and feelers approach a situation with a different mindset so because there is a difference in perception there’s a chance of communication issues. And how would we help the situation? We would ensure we had clear goals so there’s a common understanding, we would build team communication and awareness of how to interact, hold regular discussions and encourage team participation and open feedback. All our answers were written down on a large bit of paper and on reflection, we laughed realising the issues we foreseen and our approach was that of a feelers personality so the way we process a situation due to being feelers certainly came out on paper and Kerrie’s session on this topic helped us recognise this.

Having an awareness of these two functions allows us to manage people through change and make our approach more effective. It’s also possible that if you’re a feeler, that you can still use aspects of a thinker to deal with a situation however that does not indicate you have a thinkers approach – it makes you more effective as you are utilising more of the behaviours you find on each of the two functions and by being aware of them. This applies vice versa if you’re a thinker. You may have someone under performing and as a feeler you may want to analyse and collect data to confirm this is the case (thinker), you then follow up with a one on one discussion with this individual and find out why this is occurring. Are there outside influences? Is there a training issue we need to address? Maybe it’s heavy workload or an issue of conflict within the team? Kerrie gave us a story of a woman who found herself working in a senior management team and was the first woman to be promoted into this group in the lifetime of this organisation. Most of these individuals of course were thinkers – facts, figures, straight to the point, no fluff. The woman on the other hand was a feeler. She quickly discovered that in order to succeed in this group she had to learn about the behaviours of the thinkers and when required use them to communicate and work with her group. This made her more effective and able to gain more from the interactions and tasks. So again, it’s not about becoming the other type but having an awareness of it and using certain behaviours from the function when required in order to be more effective in your approach and more successful.

We covered many other topics during the day however this was a highlight as it helped to build awareness and understanding of how people think and in turn, how they react to a given situation. This is important to know so we can effectively manage people when change occurs and take an individual approach to helping them through the change.

Kudos to Kerrie for the delivery of an excellent training session!

Two roles I’ve done, my current job and an operations team leader role have both been email intensive. Currently I receive about 80 emails a day and it is incredibly difficult to keep track of what’s going on and what tasks I am meant to be doing. It was a constant haze and I felt like a deer in headlights! I tried many of the standard methods to keep myself organised and on top of things, everything from keeping a daily planner to using Outlook tasks but given time it would just grow like an out of control weed.

I’ve implemented two systems to keep track of my to do list and emails, in this post I will first cover off how I am managing my flood of email. It’s important to understand that not every system works perfectly for all, you really need to do a bit of research on what methods people are using and adopt one that suits you best based on your tools and how you work.

Upon my quest to find a solution to my problem I came across what is popularly known as ‘Inbox Zero’. The creator behind this method is Merlin Mann, the mind behind 43folder.com. After reviewing a number of his articles on this and feedback from others I implemented a number of suggestions.

I setup a number of search folders in Outlook to list emails based on their category, I then created three categories – Defer, FYI, Waiting Response. When receiving an email, I would quickly glance at it. If it is going to take more than 5 minutes to process the email, I would place it in the Defer category. If the email contained information I might need to know for the future, I would place it in the FYI category. All other email I would process on the spot. Once the email had either been processed or categorised I would move it out of the inbox into a folder called Archive. This allows for me to keep my inbox clean and I would then set time aside each day to go through my Defer emails and action those, generally at the end of the day when the daily grind slows.

I started to have issues with losing track of email conversations, I would reply or send an email to someone for which I needed a response and then completely forget about it. This is where the Waiting Response search folder comes in, I would categorise my sent email so I could track what is waiting on a response and if I receive nothing in an expected time frame, I would follow up with the person again. On top of this, I also have a number of Outlook rules setup. Anything I am CC’d on goes to it’s own folder immediately, if I’m CC’d then it’s obviously not as important as emails sent directly to me…assuming people are following email etiquette. I’m also a member of a number of email distribution lists so I have setup folders to filter this email directly to it.

I started to get really annoyed with having to click emails and drag them to the Archive folder so I did a bit of research and found a site (http://verychewy.com/archive/2006/04/12/outlook-macro-to-move-an-email-to-folder.aspx) which offered scripting examples to setup a macro to automatically do this task. I then assigned this macro to a button in a toolbar, all I have to do is select the email and click a button and it automatically moves to the Archive folder. Excellent! The less mouse work that needs to be done, the better. And how many of us have accidently dragged an email to the wrong folder? Annoying!

So this is how I am dealing with my flood of email. It’s also important to watch how much time you’re spending in Outlook, I would live in it for majority of my day. I then started to get into a routine of checking it only at certain times so I could concentrate on other things and after all, if something is important a phone call is in order, not an email. After a period of time the schedule was sacked however now I am checking Outlook at certain intervals, just not on an exact schedule. It was sufficient enough to break my addiction to Outlook.

My other tool is http://www.toodledo.com. It is an online task management system based on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”. When I receive emails in Outlook if it is something that requires a bit of time to work on I will email it to a specific Toodledo.com address and it will add a task automatically. I can even add parameters to the subject to setup the task e.g. where I need to be to complete this task (contexts). Any other tasks not received via email, I add automatically. Toodledo.com also has a very neat scheduler, you can enter how many working hours you have and it will prioritise your tasks and what is best to be completed in that time frame. A full task schedule can also be printed out. What I really like is the ability to have their app on my iPhone while on the go, I can quickly fire it up and see what is next on my list or I can add further tasks from a meeting for example. Some may not like to hear it’s a paid service however the fee is very small and well worth the money.

I recommend that you check out Merlin’s site as well as Toodledo.com if you face similar issues. Furthermore, David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done” is a worthwhile read. It gives you insight in how to better manage your time by organising yourself and managing your tasks.

I recently discovered an excellent site offering various resources and information in the form of videos, PDF’s and HTML documents relating to all kinds of management topics. I’m currently in a team lead role and have done team leader roles in previous jobs so this site offers a lot of information relating to my role which is brilliant, especially for new starters in people management like myself. I definitely recommend that if you manage people in whatever role, that you check this out!

http://www.bnet.com