I heard this at a training session and love it. This is about how you should handle very senior meetings or encounters.

When you’re presenting/in a meeting/talking with someone who is significantly senior to you, this is the right strategy.

Too often I see people try to fill up the whole hour. They fill their presentation with lots of data. They leave the conclusion to the end. They hang around even though the topic is completed.  They can seem like the wallflower wanting the attention of the football captain.

Without fail, my best presentations to senior people have been the ones which accomplish the objective of the meeting in the shortest time possible. In one meeting, I hadn’t even gotten past the first page before the senior person flipped through the entire deck and said “I agree. Anything you need from me?” At first I was dismayed: “Wait! I spent hours on this deck! I want to go through it!”  But then my boss said to me afterwards, “Great job. Usually she takes the whole hour going through the presentation line by line.”  I prefer the drive by.

Senior folks are smart and they don’t have time. The faster you’re in and out, the better.

“You’re either part of the problem, part of the solution, or part of the landscape.”

Choose to be part of the solution. You may not always have the answer, but you’ll always have a point of view.

Share it.  Don’t fade into the background.

I attended a session where someone asked “What do you do when the group is talking about something that you know nothing about?”  I know the feeling: with every minute that goes by, your smile gets more frozen, and you feel more like a statue. Continue reading →

Sometimes you’ll find yourself with two co-managers. Or with a straight line and dotted line relationship.  Often, you don’t get twice the amount of coaching and development, but you usually get twice the amount of work.  I once had a straight line to my functional manager, and a dotted line to my internal client. They didn’t get along.

Both of them would undermine the other and complain to me about the other. They didn’t respect each other. But they were colleagues, so they had to work together. One would try and control the project, while the other would fume. When preparing a presentation update for the steering team, they changed the presentation 23 times on each other’s edits. (One was in London and one was in NY so they could take advantage of the time zone difference).

I exaggerate, but not really. So how do you deal with a situation like that?

1. Don’t assume your co-managers talk. Don’t even assume they like each other. Treat each one as if they are the only manager you work for.

2. Pay attention to both equally. Everything’s fine until one finds out you’re meeting more with the other one.

3. When there’s conflicting direction, pick the solution you think is best, and sell it to both of them (though maybe not at the same time), but close enough so that one doesn’t feel like they were left out of the decision making process.

4. Never talk about one with the other. Fraught with landmines. It will get back to the other.

5. Try to see the upside: I’ve found that while the two individuals drove me nuts, they both have valuable things to teach me. And I only would have learned one had I not worked for both.

Someone asked me how to deal with office politics. Here are my lessons learned the hard way, because I am bad at it. I’ve never been one of those people who can gracefully mingle with the seniors and say the right thing. Continue reading →