Common Management Challenges and How to Deal with Them

By Ronald Hill PhD

Todays management environment is filled with a wide variety of challenges, making it difficult for managers to stay focused on achieving their goals. In Common Management Challenges and How to Deal with Them, author Ronald Hill identifies solutions to common management challenges based on his real-life management experiences as well as challenges hundreds of his consulting clients have experienced.

Relying on more than thirty-five years of experience in the business world, Hill recounts the plethora of challenges he has encountered and the ways that he resolved them, offering valuable insight on techniques to enhance personal management success. This guide introduces the concept of the vital view, breaking each management challenge into three important key points. It shows how the power of three can help managers to stay focused on the most vital aspects of managing and winning.

From learning the art of delegation to running effective meetings to conducting performance reviews, Hill offers proven solutions that have been effectively implemented and tested in a variety of organizations and have resulted in increased performance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475987980

Ronald Hill PhD

Dr. Hill has achieved success both academically and professionally. After enlisting in the US Coast Guard, he was one of three (out of over fifty) recruits selected to attend electronics technician school, where he finished first in his class. During his four-year Coast Guard enlistment, he advanced six ranks, from seaman recruit to first-class electronics technician. Upon completion of his Coast Guard enlistment, Dr. Hill obtained magna and summa cum laude degrees in electrical engineering (bachelor and master of science), a PhD in engineering science (specializing in surface physics), and an MBA. His MBA was obtained from the University of Portland in one year with a 4.0 grade point average while working full-time. During his professional career, Dr. Hill has worked as a design engineer, manager of software development, product marketing manager, VP engineering, VP corporate development, VP European operations, VP worldwide sales and marketing, president and CEO of public and private companies, and founder, president, and CEO of a successful management consulting firm with several hundred clients over a twelve-year period.

Book preview

Common

Management

Challenges

and

How to Deal with Them

Ronald Hill, PhD

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Common Management Challenges and How to Deal with Them

Common Management Challenges and How to Deal with Them.

Copyright © 2013 by Ronald Hill. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America. No part of this

book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without written permission. For information address Ronald

Hill, 717 Richardson Drive, Brentwood, CA 94513.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8796-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8797-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8798-0 (e)

Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication Data

Hill, Ronald

Common Management Challenges and How to Deal with Them 1. Management. I. Hill, Ronald. II. Title

XXXX.XXXX 2013 xxxxx-xxxx

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013907567

iUniverse rev. date: 6/4/2013

Contents

Preface: Staying Focused

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 Count to Three and Succeed

Chapter 2 The Vital Few

Chapter 3 The Ideal Manager

Chapter 4 The Management Danger Zone

Chapter 5 Avoiding the Danger Zone

Chapter 6 Keys to Effective Delegation

Chapter 7 The Monkey Mirror

Chapter 8 Key Management Tasks

Chapter 9 Plan, Organize, Implement

Chapter 10 Identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT Charts)

Chapter 11 Three Types of Information

Chapter 12 Performance Levels

Chapter 13 Effective Performance Reviews

Chapter 14 Correcting Poor Performance

Chapter 15 Poor Performance Decision Tree

Chapter 16 Preventing the Peter Principle

Chapter 17 Correcting Problems: The PGA Process

Chapter 18 Taking Corrective Action

Chapter 19 Establishing Organizational Behavior

Chapter 20 Reward Results, Not Effort

Chapter 21 Appreciate Your Team

Chapter 22 Ask for Success

Chapter 23 Focus on Strengths

Chapter 24 Focus on Encouragement

Chapter 25 Keys for Effective Leadership

Chapter 26 People Rules for Managers

Chapter 27 Team Motivation Factors

Chapter 28 Motivating Team Members

Chapter 29 Why People Quit

Chapter 30 Retaining Key Employees

Chapter 31 Building and Maintaining Trust

Chapter 32 Your Respect Rating

Chapter 33 Critical Managerial Behaviors

Chapter 34 Getting Organized

Chapter 35 Lateral Thinking

Chapter 36 Eliminating Personal Weakness

Chapter 37 Becoming Indispensable

Chapter 38 Communications Advice

Chapter 39 Effective Communication Factors

Chapter 40 Key Meeting Elements

Chapter 41 Conducting Effective Meetings

Chapter 42 Project Review Meeting Tips

Chapter 43 Goal Alignment

Chapter 44 Contingency Plan Guidelines

Chapter 45 Discuss or Act?

Chapter 46 Effective Change Management

Chapter 47 Effective To-Do Lists

Chapter 48 Key Time Management Factors

Chapter 49 Time Wasters

Chapter 50 Coping with Change

Chapter 51 Key Interviewing Techniques

Chapter 52 Effort vs. Reward

Endnotes

About the Author

Preface: Staying Focused

In today’s competitive business environment, there is limited time, resources, and energy to achieve results. On the flip side, there seemingly is no limit to the number of distractions facing today’s manager. Staying focused on the vital few and not being distracted by the trivial many ensures maximum progress toward goals.

I have used the concept of the vital few throughout the book, breaking each common management challenge into three vital factors to be effectively dealt with. By focusing on the top three vital factors, it becomes much easier to stay focused on the vital aspects of managing and winning.

This publication is based on my personal management challenges encountered over thirty years, those challenges encountered while consulting with hundreds of managers at all corporate levels, and several years of reflection on actual management successes and failures and how to use this experience to enhance management performance.

Acknowledgments

This publication would not have been possible without all the people I have worked with during my academic and professional career. Their feedback relating to my performance, although not always what I wanted to hear, enabled me to reflect back on my career and how I could have significantly enhanced my personal performance above and beyond the success I did achieve. I share these lessons throughout this book.

My mentors during my career are too numerous to mention here, but I would especially like to thank the following people:

Bill Jensen, CEO of Intrawest, a leader in experiential destination resorts, who initially encouraged me to write this book and taught me to always go one step beyond just solving a problem.

Robert Bissell, former president of Wells Capital Management (a subsidiary of Wells Fargo), who over the years has been supportive of my ideas and demonstrates a human side of management to be admired.

Bud Runnels, one of my managers early on in my career, who taught me that my perception of my performance and capability doesn’t always match others’ perceptions and that providing honest, nonjudgmental feedback is critical to personal development.

Irving Bud Lyons, who allowed me the first opportunity to prove that my management theory works in a corporate-wide environment.

And last but not least, thanks to my wife, Becky, who kept the home fires burning while I chased my career all around the globe. She deserves more credit than I can ever give her.

Introduction

The idea for Common Management Challenges and How to Deal with Them has been in my mind for a number of years. For over thirty-five years, I was fortunate to have a career spanning positions from frontline worker bee to president and CEO of both public and private companies, as well as founding and successfully operating a management consulting business for twelve years. This has been complemented with nine years of undergraduate and graduate study, including a BS, MS, PhD, and MBA (all with high honors), and attendance at numerous management workshops and the reading of dozens of management-theory books.

During my career, I noticed that things tend to naturally fall into groups of three, as in these examples:

When I retired, I took up the game of golf and soon realized it can be a very complex and frustrating sport. After trying to master everything—and failing—I decided to focus on just three basic things: grip, posture, and alignment. Once I mastered these three, I moved on to the next set of skills, and I found my game steadily improving.

Each day in my management career had many issues to be addressed, including numerous distractions defocusing my attention from what was really vital. Realizing that managing, like golf, can also be very complex and frustrating, it occurred to me that perhaps it would be possible to focus management functions into three basic concepts, forming a management foundation. When I applied this thinking to the general topic of management, I realized that management also has three key activities: planning, organizing, and implementing. Mastery of these basics provides a solid foundation for the mastery of other aspects of management. On the flip side, if you don’t master these basics, your management career will be an exercise in frustration.

The lessons I learned during my professional career have all been invaluable and are based on real-life situations I had to face. In addition, during my management consulting years, I was able to witness and assess hundreds of managers at all levels of the corporate ladder. I realized that no matter their rank, managers can overlook opportunity, make fundamental mistakes, and quite often overlook their most important management tool: their staff.

It has been a lifelong journey of learning. The most important lesson I learned was the secret of how to succeed: namely, stay focused on the vital few. I have applied this lesson to the field of management and share these lessons in this publication. Each lesson focuses on three key elements necessary to effectively deal with common management challenges. It is my hope that these tips will provide you with an alternative to learning them the hard way.

Chapter 1

Count to Three and Succeed

Define Your Management Success.

Identify Critical Objectives.

Stay Focused on the Vital Few.

We can all count to three, and we can count a wide variety of different things, some of which may be critical to our success as managers and others that