Feedback Digest: 3 articles to kick-start your week

1. 4 Practical Ways to Keep Your Team Connected To You & Each Other

This week on bNET, Wayne Turmel discusses his ideas on alignment and how a team can connect better to improve the overall productivity of your team.

Creating strong human connections is critical to productive remote teams. The trick, of course, is not to simply know that, but to act on a daily basis in a way that helps create that positive team dynamic.

Here are some tips I gathered from this article to align your team:

• Check in frequently, for bad news but even more for good news.
• Find ways to celebrate their successes with the whole team.
• Budget for travel every year, once for reviews and once for something else.
• Share a “virtual lunch” with the rest of the team a few times a year.

Deb Richardson from Mozilla on dria.org shares her thoughts on how important 1:1′s are - especially when working remotely.

We have shown a great interest in bNET’s Connected Manager, Wayne Turmel – you can check out some of his other pieces we have shown a liking to on our blog.

2. Bad Boss: 14 Horror Stories About The World’s Worst Bosses From The Author Of ‘Good Boss, Bad Boss’

I couldn’t resist – this post was just too funny and the examples far fetched that I needed to include this one in the digest…

Here are some examples I thought were especially horrible!

He gave his employees used, counterfeit designer watches to reward them for their efforts.

Giving the first employee of the month award to himself.

I once worked for a firm whose chief executive made promotion decisions based on graphology, astrology, and a variety of pseudo-scientific techniques.

I can’t believe some of these! Bob Sutton refers to some that are totally gross and some that are unbelievable! I would hate to have a boss that thinks of feedback as giving me a cheap used watch!

I took one from Bob’s books a little while ago and came up with my own Top 10 post. Check out who I think are the Top 10 Worst Fictional Bosses.

3. Why Am I Not Getting Any Respect?

Evil HR Lady, also known as Suzanne Lucas answered a great question about respect on bNET last week.

Dear Evil HR Lady,

I have an employee who is 11 years older than I am and he thinks he knows more than and is more qualified than I am.  He ignores my requests, won’t cc me on e-mails and doesn’t provide me with information about what he’s working on.  I’ve tried meeting, talking, and sending him e-mails, but nothing seems to work with this silly man.  What do I do?

What you need to do is act like a manager.  A real one.  Here are some of her tips:

• Does this employee have more knowledge/experience than you do? You don’t need to know how to make widgets to run a widget making company.  You just need to know how to run a company and how to hire people who know how to make widgets.
• Set objectives that make sense. Sit down with your employee and set objectives and clear requirements.
• Give feedback. Good and bad.  In fact, more good than bad.  It’s in your best interest to have a hardworking, experienced employee.  Don’t blow it by ignoring his successes and failures.

Photo of pointing fingers by Lovati’s Photos. Licensed under CC.