“I need to fix this..NOW”

Do your departmental meetings go on and on? Do team members turn up late or don’t attend at all?

You know this situation very well…..

It’s 8.00pm, you’ve already had a hard day at work. In the morning, for the first time, you have to manage a department meeting because your boss won’t be in the office – he only told you as you were finishing off for the day – and you’ve never chaired a meeting before.

Immediately after the meeting, you have to have a difficult conversation with that lazy guy in legal. That was in your diary but you’ve never given someone a warning before and you thought you had the whole evening to prepare for it.

You want to get a full night’s sleep without worrying. It’s 3 hours until bedtime. You have to get the meeting and the hard conversation planned and sewn up so you’re “ready to go” – the minute you get to work.

In the last hour, since you got home, you’ve researched on the Internet and you’ve skimmed some books but all you’ve got is theory and that’s not what you need right now. It feels that you are just going round and round the issue, the background, what various management gurus think etc etc.

You want to yell “I don’t need all this. I need to know EXACTLY how to do it – NOW”

AND

Does your boss drop tasks on you?

For instance…….

You’ve had a crazy, mad month and tonight you’ve planned an evening with a new friend. You’re really looking forward to it. You walk with your boss to the car park on your way home and he says “let’s get together at 9am for a quick meeting to plan how we can improve performance appraisals this year”.

Your heart sinks because all you know is the current appraisal system – are there other models?. If you try to get out of it, your boss will think you know nothing. How can you get the knowledge you need in the one hour you have between arriving home and your dinner date?

5 minute guides will give you good quality information to get you started, enough for you to make an informed and intelligent contribution to the discussion in the morning or to chair the meeting. They are based on sound management theory and buy you time to read up on it tomorrow or on the weekend.

When you need to know how to deal with today’s problems – fast – check out our Five Minute Guides.