The Modern Manager

Learn from executive coach Rae Ringel about facilitating effective and inclusive meetings, adapting facilitation for virtual settings, and improving collaboration. Explore the importance of emotional check-ins, diverse participation, and the power of coaching in developing leadership skills. Get exclusive access to articles on speech improvement and when to meet in person.

Ever feel like you don't have enough time because you're too busy working on tasks, attending meetings, and checking email? If so, you're not alone. Who has time for planning when there is so much to do?! In reality, a daily planning habit puts you in control of your schedule, workload, and productivity.  Today’s guest is Ashutosh Priyadarshy. Ashutosh is the Co-founder and CEO of Sunsama, a daily planning assistant that helps knowledge workers stay focused and productive throughout their workdays. Ashutosh has spent most of the last decade building and launching productivity software. His goal is to build products that help us navigate our work and life mindfully and intentionally. Ashutosh and I  talk about why daily planning is an important process, how we can use daily planning to boost productivity and feel a sense of accomplishment, and more. Members of the Modern Manager community get an exclusive 30-day free trial of Sunsama. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: Boost Productivity with Daily Planning   KEEP UP WITH ASHUTOSH Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sunsamahq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/sunsamaHQ Website: https://get.sunsama.com/   Key Takeaways: Create a daily planning habit at a time that works best for you. It doesn’t need to be at the start of your day. Starting your day with a plan helps you focus on your most important tasks. Bring your calendar and tasks together to get an accurate picture of how you’ll spend your time. In addition to meetings and tasks, we have plenty of ‘work chores’ that need to be done every day. Share your daily plan with your team to keep people informed, create accountability, and encourage yourself to plan accurately. End your day with a reflection on what you accomplished to help feel fulfilled and build momentum. mamie@mamieks.com instagram.com/mamieks

No matter how big or small your team is, there are always things to discuss. Most managers respond by holding weekly meetings. At their best, team meetings are a forum for open and productive communication between team members. At their worst, they waste everyone’s time and energy. If your weekly meetings aren't moving your work forward and leaving people in a positive mood, it’s probably time you redesign them. In this episode, I share practical advice that you can implement to make your weekly meetings more productive and enjoyable for everyone. The full episode guide includes an overview of the factors to consider when designing a team meeting, along with examples of team meeting structures, formats, and prework to consider using as a model for your team. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community or purchase the full guide at www.themodernmanager.com/shop.    Get the free mini-guide at themodernmanager.com/miniguides.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles, and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: Make Weekly Team Meetings Work for Your Team   Key Takeaways: There is no right way to have a team meeting. The key is to identify your meeting objectives so that you can design the meeting to meet those needs. Consider the flow of the agenda. How will you structure your time together to achieve the meeting objectives?  Team meetings can be as short as 15 minutes or as long as multiple hours, as long as the time is well spent. Determine what people can do to best prepare for the meeting. This could include completing a dashboard, contributing topics to discuss, or nothing at all. Don’t assume a weekly meeting is necessary. Sometimes daily or monthly cadences are more appropriate. Explore the format that will best meet the team’s needs. It could be in person, virtually, via Slack, or something else. Regularly revisit the design of your team meetings to assess if they are still meeting the team’s needs. It’s okay to experiment with different choices in order to optimize how your team meets. mamie@mamieks.com

Understanding identity is vital for managers. We all want to respect and better understand our colleagues, but in order to do that we must first understand ourselves. Identity informs how we relate to people, how we make decisions, and how we lead.  Today’s guest is Victoria Shiroma Wilson. Victoria is a leadership development coach and consultant who partners with world-class organizations and professionals to discover their purpose, develop a powerful vision, and design a strategy toward transformation. Victoria is valued as a big-picture visionary who empowers her clients to think boldly and holistically about their future by examining cultural and systemic influences within a greater ecosystem. Victoria and I talk about identity - what it is, which is so much more than DNA, how it informs how we show up as a leader and interpret the world, how understanding identity can help us better engage our colleagues and make decisions, and a whole lot more.   Members of the Modern Manager community get a free handout that offers a set of eight reflective questions around the 4 Cs of exceptional management: Confidence, Collaboration, Communication, and Culture. In addition, the first member to email mamie@mamieks.com will receive a free copy of Victoria’s upcoming book, which will be published in September. Get these bonuses when you join the Modern Manager community.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: Understand Identity to Lead More Powerfully   KEEP UP WITH VICTORIA LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriashiromawilson/ Website: https://www.exceptionalfutures.com/ Email: hello@exceptionalfutures.com    Key Takeaways: Identity is formed through the outside in and inside out. It’s how we experience the world that informs how we perceive it and ourselves. We all make assumptions about identity and what the experience of a given identity entails, but often those aren’t true because identity is intersectional and complex. We can use our differences in identity if we switch from “I am” to “I see”. Instead of “I am a woman, therefore…” to “From my perspective, I see…” We all develop professional identities that are developed through internalizing the company culture and how people respond to us. Reflect on your own experiences to better understand their influence on your identity. Identity impacts how you lead, including how you make decisions because the information and perspective we bring to a decision is based on our experiences and identity. Misunderstandings can come from approaching a situation differently or with different past experiences or identities that we take for granted. mamie@mamieks.com instagram.com/mamieks

Both verbal and nonverbal communication are critical interpersonal skills. Listening to others, observing their reactions, speaking in a way that promotes understanding and connection, using body language—these are all essential to our leadership development. Effective leaders must know that communicating is a combination of what you say, how you say it, and how you respond to what has been said back to you. Today’s guest is Richard Newman. Richard is the Founder of Body Talk. Over the past 22 years his team have trained over 120,000 business leaders around the world, to improve their communication and impact, including one client who gained over $1 Billion in new business in just one year, using the strategies that Richard teaches. Richard and I talk about the unspoken parts of communication, communicating effectively remotely, keeping people engaged in a meeting or presentation, and so much more.  Members of the Modern Manager community get a free audiobook version of Richard’s book, You Were Born to Speak. This work discusses everything he has learned in his 23-year journey, filled with practical strategies that you can apply immediately to transform your success. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: Revolutionize Your Team’s Communication With These Simple Skills   KEEP UP WITH RICHARD Personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/richardnewmanspeaks/Business Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ukbodytalk/Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardnewmanspeaks/Business LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/communicationskillstraining/ Book: You Were Born To Speak Website: https://ukbodytalk.com/   Key Takeaways: Communication is how we connect and build relationships. It’s a two way street of sending messages out and responding to others.  Use audio/video tools for any information with an emotional or nuanced context. Too much gets lost when using text only. Consider the direction and intention of your message and how you want others to feel and act afterwards.  Set up your Zoom screen so that your hands are visible. Hands are underrated as communication tools. The real problem isn’t Zoom Fatigue but Death By Powerpoint. Our survival brain doesn’t think the information is relevant to our lives and turns off. To combat this, use storytelling tools.  Get your team involved in the drama by providing context for why you are meeting. Ask what their personal challenges are and try to resolve them through the meeting. This activates their brain to feel invested. The people in the meeting - not the manager- are the heroes in the story.  Build up your team’s confidence in their communication skills by giving them opportunities to practice and providing positive feedback. mamie@mamieks.com instagram.com/mamieks

Be honest with yourself for a moment: Are you managing your time and tasks well? Do you have a weekly planning routine that helps ensure you’re focused on your most important work? Sometimes, just a few simple changes to your planning can help you find more freedom and fulfillment in your work. Today’s guest is Demir Bentley. Demir teaches hard-hitting efficiency techniques and proven accountability strategies that have helped clients generate millions in revenue while saving thousands of hours. In the past eight years, he’s helped more than 50,000 professionals, including executives from Facebook, Google, Uber and PepsiCo – helping them prevent burnout and create more freedom in their lives. And, Demir’s advice has been highlighted in Forbes, Bloomberg, Entrepreneur and more. Demir and I talk about the #1 routine you should do every week to exponentially improve your productivity…the weekly planning session. We get into how to do it, when to do it, and what makes it so powerful. Members of the Modern Manager community have a chance to get 1 of 20 free Kindle versions of Demir’s book, “Winning the Week”. In this book, Demir and Carey Bentley reveal their five-step method that radically reimagines how you plan and execute your week. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: 5 Steps to a Productive Week   KEEP UP WITH DEMIR Website: lifehackmethod.com Book: winningtheweek.com Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/lifehackbootcamp Instagram: http://instagram.com/demirandcarey Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/demirandcarey   Key Takeaways: There are hundreds of productivity tips, tools, practices, habits, routines. Instead of trying to do them all or sift through to find the best one for yourself, start with the fundamentals of planning your week. Everyone knows about weekly planning but few people do it correctly, and most people don’t do it at all. To plan your week, start by removing the frictions or increasing your motivation to spend 30 minutes on the planning process. Follow these five steps: learn from how you worked last week, find one leveraged priority to include this next week, interrogate your calendar to surface issues, prioritize your to do list, add tasks to your calendar to ensure you’ve scheduled time to complete the important work. It is essential to know what you want to accomplish in order to be productive.  You can improve your personal productivity habits and routines, as well as increase productivity through automation, technology, and delegation. All of your productivity approaches should support your desired lifestyle, helping you live the life you desire.   mamie@mamieks.com instagram.com/mamieks

Vacation time is so important. We know there are a myriad of health benefits that come from taking time away from work. I also know how anxiety producing it can be to worry about your team or projects while you're away or stress over returning to an overflowing inbox and build-up of tasks, which can negate some of the health benefits and enjoyment of your time off. So what can you do to make your vacation time as rejuvenating as possible? Today's episode is about preparing to be out for vacation. I walk through 5 approaches to consider to help you prepare to be out of the office and make your time away and re-entry as smooth as possible. The full episode guide includes an overview of these principles plus tips for communicating tasks and responsibilities effectively to your team members so that there's no confusion. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community or purchase the full guide at www.themodernmanager.com/shop.     Get the free mini-guide at themodernmanager.com/miniguides.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles, and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: How to Effectively Prepare Yourself and Your Team for Vacation Time    Key Takeaways: Taking vacations provides essential health benefits. Prepare well to minimize worrying about your team/work while away.  Create a shared vacation calendar to coordinate time off, except for holiday times, to ensure multiple people aren’t out at the same time.  Prep at least two weeks ahead of time so you can get organized and ensure everyone knows their responsibilities. Consult prior to-do lists to keep track of expected tasks.  Document processes for tasks while doing them rather than by memory. Record the screen while narrating to ensure you’ve included all essential and accurate information.   Consider what you’ll do ahead of time, what you’ll delay, what you’ll hand off, and what you’ll do while out. Determine how much you want staff to be able to contact you while out of the office and via what tools.  Consider which tasks might be a growth opportunity for certain colleagues. Make sure people are on board and confident with their new temporary roles.  When returning to work, don’t try to do everything on Day 1. Schedule follow-up meetings and block time on your to ease back in. Ask staff to prepare a document recapping key activities, decisions, and takeaways from while you were gone.  mamie@mamieks.com

Does it ever seem like your tasks just keep piling no matter how busy you are? As managers, it’s crucial that we’re able to follow through on our tasks and responsibilities so we can take care of our businesses and people. But in order to do that, we must have the right tools and mindset to organize and prioritize our daily work.    Today’s guest is Mark J. Silverman. Mark is an executive coach, author, and podcast host. He works with leaders and their teams around the world, to address the underlying behaviors and mindsets that sabotage all “time management” and “productivity tools”. Mark and I talk about prioritization through the lens of getting the right things done at the right time. We explore the concepts from his book Only 10s: Confront Your To-Do List, Transform Your Life and how to stay focused on what matters most even when you’ve got external pressures that make it feel impossible. Members of the Modern Manager community get access to a specialized web page for the Modern Manager Community. This page includes nine video modules on topics including difficult conversations, dealing with distractions, and energy mastery. Many of the modules include a “Taking Action Worksheet.” This page also includes a link you can use to schedule a follow-up meeting with Mark. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles, transcripts and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: Be The Master Of Your To Do List Every Day   KEEP UP WITH MARK Website: https://www.markjsilverman.com Instagram: @markjsilverman Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mark.silverman.54 Twitter: @mjaysilverman LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark22102/   Key Takeaways: 10s are the things that have to be done, today, only by you. The only thing we own in life is our time and attention. Our 10s reflect our deepest values and priorities.  When we are afraid to upset others by saying no, we end up overloaded and unable to prioritize our most important tasks.  When delegating work, we need to teach others to meet our standards. Set up agreements for how the work will get done and what success looks like.  Give feedback for subpar work instead of doing it yourself.  A boss may assign too much work to the point where you’re unable to meet their goals. Say no through affirmative statements like “I want to help get things done but I need more resources.” The 3 stages of setting a boundary are through (1) anger, when you’ve reached a breaking point, (2) explaining, or making excuses for why you can’t do it, and (3) strength and love, when you own your choices. While some who relied on you as a crutch may leave your life, others will shift and appreciate your change.  The first things to delegate are tasks that are administrative or require your greatest weaknesses to get done. Have a plan for who you will hire when you reach a certain level.  Make an Only 10s to-do list each day. If you discover you’ve got a task that rolls over to the next day, consider why it didn’t get done and what systems you need in place to keep this from happening in the future. mamie@mamieks.com instagram.com/mamieks

Authenticity at work requires being true to yourself. However, this can be a difficult feat for managers. We often step into the management position believing there is a certain way we must speak and act, or certain knowledge we should now possess simply because we’re leading others, but research shows people respond more favorably to managers who are their true selves. How can managers fulfill their role while being true to their personalities, capabilities, and limitations? Today’s guest is Sabrina Horn. Sabrina is an award-winning CEO, author, communications expert, and advisor. Her career is highlighted by 25 years as Founder, CEO, and President of Horn Group, the iconic U.S. tech communications agency she founded in Silicon Valley at age 29. She is currently CEO of HORN Strategy, focused on helping entrepreneurs navigate the early stages of their companies. She is here today to talk with us about her new book, Make It, Don’t Fake It: Leading with Authenticity for Real Business Success. Sabrina and I talk about imposter syndrome, how to be appropriately authentic, how to overcome your inner critic's fears by acting ‘as if’ and more strategies for being real and amazing at work. Members of the Modern Manager community can get one of five signed copies of Sabrina’s book, Make It, Don’t Fake It. This book offers executives concrete advice on what to do when faced with everyday challenges and big dilemmas, so leaders can make the right decisions and build durable businesses. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: Overcome Imposter Syndrome and Lead with Authenticity   KEEP UP WITH SABRINA Website: https://www.sabrinahorn.com Book: Make It, Don’t Fake It LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabrinahorn/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/sabrinahorn Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sabrinahorn/   Key Takeaways: Being inauthentic is unsustainable. Even though it’s hard to face the truth, it's harder in the long-run to hide from it. There are multiple levels of “faking it” that range from innocent white lies, to exaggerating the truth, to lies of omission, to full on fakery. Even small lies often lead to more, bigger lies because we become afraid to let the truth come out.  Imposter syndrome is when you underestimate yourself given your prior accomplishments. While you may feel like you’re faking it, you’re not. The majority of overachievers feel imposter syndrome, but women and minorities experience it more frequently. Acting “as if” you had the confidence (not experience or knowledge) needed for the situation can be a great way to overcome imposter syndrome. Write down a list of all your accomplishments to help you objectively see your own greatness. Imagine what behaviors someone who was successful would do. Then do these behaviors or invest in developing the skills to do them. Managers may have to behave in ways that feel unnatural in order to be a good manager. The key is to be fully invested in these behaviors even if they don’t feel authentic. mamie@mamieks.com instagram.com/mamieks

It's cliche, but true: Your people are your biggest asset. There's nothing more important than hiring people who are a strong fit for the job responsibilities and also align with your organization's values and mission. But recruiting the right people for your team can pose a challenge, and the hiring process can leave managers feeling exhausted. Today’s guest is Tatiyana Cure. Tatiyana brings her extensive background as an executive recruiter and talent acquisition leader to her work of coaching managers. She has partnered with thousands of hiring managers in a wide variety of industries. She is passionate about helping managers achieve their business goals through effective talent strategies. Tatiyana wrote her first book: "Hire to Win: Manager's Practical Guide for Attracting and Interviewing Top Talent" to share a blueprint for those looking for a step-by-step guide in hiring. We talk about the ins and outs of hiring: how to write a good job description, how to distinguish who to invite to an interview and who to pass on, how to handle reference checks, and so much more, so that you can hire the right people for your team. 10 members of the Modern Manager community get a free copy of Tatiyana’s book, Hire to Win. This step-by-step playbook accompanies managers looking to achieve better results, higher profits, and more success through the employees they hire. Get it when you join the Modern Manager community.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and free mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Read the related blog article: The Step by Step Guide to Hiring the Perfect Person   KEEP UP WITH TATIYANA Website: https://howtowintalent.com/ Book: Hire to Win LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tatiyanacure/   Key Takeaways: Build a recruiting intake process as a blueprint. Consider what goal you are trying to accomplish, why your organization is unique, and what success in the job looks like.  Get to the point quickly when writing a job description. Spell out specifically what you’re looking for and what the role entails. Include the compensation range.  There are four types of applicants; Blanket Folks who apply to every position, Role Players who have the skill set in place already, Stretchers who are looking to advance their career, and Head Scratchers who have taken a leave and are returning or trying a new career path.  Ignore Blanket Folk resumes. Know how to pitch the job to Role Players on why you’re unique and benefit them. Interview some Stretchers and Head Scratchers as they often have hidden talents.  Align with your staff on what you’re assessing in the interview process, what questions you’ll each be asking, and how you’ll be evaluating candidates' responses. Involve other stakeholders in the interview process to assess technical, communication, and other skills.  Set up a peer interview for the applicant to learn what a day in the life of the role is like. Show the culture in action. This minimizes the chance of any surprises once the applicant starts the job.  Give time for a reverse interview, for the candidate to get all their questions answered.  Discuss work styles to avoid future friction.  Ask for references from people who directly reported to the person and/or managed them. Give them space to share their initial thoughts before prompting with your specific questions.  mamie@mamieks.com instagram.com/mamieks