First Item: Touchy-feely or drill sergeant -- what kind of coach are you?
As coaches become more common in leadership development, it's important to distinguish between their approaches and what they can provide. Alison Stein Wellner delineates four types in Inc. magazine:
The Best Friend
This coach provides a shoulder to cry on, listens to your gripes, helps put things in context, and assists you to develop strategies for change. Watch out, however, that your new best friend doesn't help let you off the hook on issues you must address.
The Guru
Beyond being an expert in running a business, this coach has an almost spiritual appeal, with an overarching philosophy on management and self-actualization, and perhaps even books, videos or seminars to sell you. Don't lose your bearings, however, as you get entranced by his or her aura.
The Number Cruncher
This coach delves deep into your business, studying processes, performing quantitative analysis and helping to create metrics to measure progress. You want to hire them when numbers rather than interpersonal issues are the issue, but you still have to be wary of becoming an emotionless drone who boils every challenge down to a number.
The Drill Instructor
When you lack motivation, you may want somebody who will correct your bad habits by getting in your face, establishing strict schedules, and pressing you to maintain them. Watch out however that you don't eventually rebel, becoming like your petulant teenage son.
Tech: Five tips to ensure your laptop battery doesn't die
Laptops are only as good as their battery life, and no matter how respectable the endurance for your notebook, you may find these five tips from Timothy Captain in Laptop magazine helpful for extending battery life:
1. Power down the display: You can get as much as ten minutes of battery life per level of brightness lowered, and also gain from lowering the screen resolution and disabling extra features like Clear Type fonts and fade effects.
2. Turn off unused device: Shut down the Wi-Fi radio, Ethernet adapter, infrared transceiver, and Bluetooth radio.
3. Decrease hard drive activity: To minimize the frequency with which your hard drive has to spin up to access data, defragment your hard drive regularly.
4. Disable start-up items: Control what programs boot up automatically when you start up by going to Start/Run, entering C:\misconfig, and clearing the checkbox of any that are unnecessary.
5. Condition the battery: When you buy your next notebook, charge the battery to 100 per cent, discharge it completely, and then fully charge to 100 per cent again to help the battery remember how much electrical charge it can hold. You don't have to fully discharge it again but make sure each charging is to 100 per cent.
Strategy: Love your dogs instead of starving them
In determining which businesses to nurture, senior executives usually choose to plunk more resources into their "stars" that are returning superior returns on capital and to starve or sell their underperforming dogs. But three Booz Allen Hamilton consultants argue in a Strategy + Business report that thinking is based on past performance and not necessarily a prediction of future returns.
"Just as some fund managers earn superior returns by identifying and buying undervalued 'market dogs' -- better known as value stocks -- corporate leadership can learn to identify 'value assets,' hold and nurture them, and produce superior performance," they write. Their study of 25 years of U.S. stock price performance found that fixing your dogs can yield unexpected levels of shareholder value, even when their key financial indicators lag behind those of other business units, and buying and fixing someone else's dogs will product more shareholder value than buying stars.
Power Points: Eight ways to shine at meetings and much more
Be a meeting star: Believe in yourself. Be succinct. Look at people, not the floor. Sit opposite your boss. Circulate documents beforehand. Turn arguments into discussions. Accept points from the other side. Take notes.
Source: Management Today
Put the brakes on rental charges: Trim car rental charges by 60 per cent by requiring employees travelling by air to rent away from the airport, if possible.
Source: The Kiplinger Report
Map quest: Organizing expert Julie Morgenstern suggests creating a "time map" that divides each day into appropriate-sized chunks for the main compartments of your life, and then allocating specific tasks to each compartment as they arise. A consultant's time map might have hours allocated for billable clients, speaking, pro-bono work, and self.
Source: The Inside Out Newsletter
The hardest thing: After having lunch with somebody in publishing who said the hardest thing in her business is not finding authors but hiring great people and watching the cash flow, consultant Seth Godin asks: What is the hardest thing in your business and what percentage of your time do you spend on it?
Source: Seth's Blog.
No-sweat spills: Keyboard coffee spills are no problem with the washable, lightweight, rollable Adesso AKB-230 keyboard, which you can rinse in lukewarm water.
Source: Business 2.0
Harvey Schachter is a Battersea, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. e-mail:
Harvey Schachter