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Thanks to Week 191 SOBs

June 20, 2009 by Liz

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Delegation Happens: Working with Friends Can Be Dangerous

June 17, 2009 by Liz

Ever End Up Doing Someone Else’s Work?

Susannah was an editor who worked me years go. She had a project that needed help and knew just the person she wanted to call … her friend Christie. Christie was an experienced editor on maternity leave.

A meeting was set. Christie came in to get the work. Susannah explained exactly what was entailed and when it was due.

When the due date arrived, the work never came. When the work came, it was less than what Susannah had described. Susannah ended up doing the work and paid her friend anyway.

Ever been there?

Some things to remember when you’re about to delegate work to a friend.

Prepare for a friend as you would for someone you’ve never met. One clear signal to your friend and yourself of the business nature of what you’re doing is to treat the conversation as a strictly “work” conversation.
Define the relationship as you would with a new client or a new employee. When we’re delegating to a friend, communication can complicate itself. Friendship filters can recast everything that’s said. State your expectations. Write out guidelines and share them.
Leave room for the possibility that you’ve misjudged your friend’s skill set. As you describe the task ask whether this sounds like something he or she wants to do and has the time to do well.
Explain everything as clearly and in detail. We tend to endow our friends with information they don’t have. Understanding is often assumed — we assume they know things because they’re our friends.
Take time to say what the work means to you and your situation. Let the friend know that you are depending on him or her for your success. State clearly why you’re delegating the work and what depends on part of the project that you’re handing over.
Talk about who will make corrections or revisions to things that get missed if the work is incomplete or incorrectly executed. If at all possible, have time in the schedule for sending it back to your friend for such revisions.
If your ability to communicate during this conversation seems difficult, call off the delegation. It’s better to find someone else than to move forward with what doesn’t seem to be a good communication already.

On the Internet, we meet and make friends easily, but sometimes we endow them with the “halo effect,” thinking their great personality is a sign of their great compentency.
Sometimes the only way to learn that we’ve gotten a wrong impression is by asking for help and finding out the person isn’t who we thought. Usually though, asking a few questions, and offering complete information can get us to a great working relationship.

We all have friends who are better than we are at so many things. Are you finding the right ones to help you when you need them?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Buy the Insider’s Guide. Learn how to write so that the Internet talks back!

It’s Time to Prepare for SOBCon 2010!

June 16, 2009 by SOBCon Authors

The SOBCon2010 “Reserve Now, Pay Later” Program | TerryStarbucker.com

We have a theme for 2010 – “Where the Virtual Meets the Concrete“.

Or as Terry Starbucker likes to call it – “The Return of the Digiloggers, Part 2“

But there’s a catch.

We can only accommodate 150 people, max.

This is a gathering where size does matter, and we really want to keep the numbers at a level where we maximize the value of the learning and interactions.

So that’s why we’ve already opened up registration, so those who would like to get a head start on reserving a seat to this event can do so, right now.

Because I know you don’t want to miss it.

But we also know that plucking down cash so far in advance is a lot to ask.

Therefore, we are announcing the “Reserve Now, Pay Later” program. It’s a “three-fer”:

1. You get a seat early, and rest easy – your there
2. You get a deeply discounted rate – $300 off the “at the door” price
3. You only have to put down a $95 deposit now – and just pay the rest by December 31, 2009

Here’s what you need to do:

* Go to the SOBCon2010 Registration site
* Click “Enter Discount Code“
* Put in this code: paylater10, then click “apply discount“
* Buy your tickets at $95
* Pay the remaining $500 per ticket to us by 12/31/09 to keep your seats (I”ll let you know how to do that)

To take advantage of this program you need to act quickly – the $595 rate, and thus this program, expires on July 3, 2009

Delegation 2: I Can't Let Someone Else Do That!!

June 16, 2009 by Liz

No One Can Do This Like I Would

Delegation is the art and a science of communication needs. For most of us, it’s a skill we acquire, not a talent that comes naturally. Delegation takes practice in order to fully share
enough information for another person to complete a task successfully. Have you ever left a meeting sure you knew what to do, only to realize later that you didn’t understand. Yeah, me too.

More than that, it takes the ability to communicate the importance of the task and to negotiate a work agreement that shifts the accountability for making sure that the task is on time, complete, and of high quality.

Before you delegate a job, have a plan to communicate to the person who’s joining your project. Great communication will help in making sure that you pass on accountability and a sense of mission with the work that you’re handing over.

Start with the big picture. Decide what every person on the project must know. Offering the big picture context helps a new player immediately frame decisions and judgment calls properly.
Show where this piece fits. By placing the delegated assignment into the context. We communicate its importance to us and to the success of the project.
Explain and show exactly what a good result would look like. Write guidelines or goals for the task. Have examples of a prototype or something similar that you and the delegatee can discuss. Take the time to say what you want and what you like.
Invest more time if the meeting can’t be face to face. When a conversation isn’t face-to-face, communication degrades significantly. Some figures say it goes as low as 35% comprehension without visual reinforcement. Send an agenda or samples before you meet.
Know your goals and how you’ll check whether you’ve communicated clearly. Include and early sample to check that messages you think you communicated are the same ones that were heard. A quick look at a first step can save a project gone way off kilter.

The minute we delegate, communication becomes key. Unfortunately in an effort to show respect for other professionals we often tell them less than they need to know and still think we’re telling them too much. In like manner rather than looking like they don’t know, the often ask less than they might.

What’s the single biggest error you find you make when you’re asking someone to do work for you?

Tomorrow … Delegation Happens: Working with Friends Can Be Dangerous

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Buy the Insider’s Guide. Learn how to write so that the Internet talks back!

Delegation: How Do You Scale Up and Still Do Your Best Work?

June 15, 2009 by Liz

DELEGATION 1

No One Can Do This Like I Would

The single social media questions I hear most is:

How do I find time do it all?

I usually answer, “You can’t and I don’t think you’d want to, even if you could.”

We all can only do what’s humanly possible.
We all get the same 24 hours in the same day.

So what’s the best way to get things done in the time that we have?

How Do You Scale Up and Still Do Your Best Work?

Communication might be easier, even quicker through technology, but more people further apart take longer to communicate with. Take, for example, a simple request for information. One message might get to 20 friends, but not all of them will get and respond to that message at the same time in the same way. Not all of them will respond completely. Some will not respond at all. Some will misread or not read the directions and send information that doesn’t help.

Time is an unrenewable resource. We can’t make more. So how do we make the best use of the time that we have?

Analyze the work you do to find your high impact value and core compentencies. Why do people hire you? What do you do that makes the most difference? Isolate those tasks and skills. No one is expert at every step of the process. Decide which steps are where you add the highest value. Is it planning, service, execution, design, management, writing, administration? Choose no more than two.
Identify the skills and tasks that you do least efficiently — those that you like least, those that you don’t do well, those that anyone can do.
Change the way you work to offer those tasks to someone who does them better than you do.

That’s right, the way to offer more of our best work is to delegate. It’s easy to think that no one would do it like we would. And it’s probably true.

But different isn’t the same as wrong and sometimes different is better.

The trick is knowing what to delegate and knowing that we don’t have to delegate the WHOLE task. We can delegate chunks.

Start with the obvious stuff. Let fresh eyes read your work for errors. Ask another person to key in the changes. Those are tasks that are easily isolated and executed by someone who’s probably more proficient at them than we are. We can check the final before it goes out.

When we pass on the tasks that we don’t like, don’t do well, and don’t need to do, we can put the best of our time where it makes the most difference — doing what only we can do.

How so you offer more of your best work when you’re scaling up?

Part 2 tomorrow … Delegation 2: I Can’t Let Someone Else Do That!!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Buy the Insider’s Guide. Learn how to write so that the Internet talks back!