Page 74 - Make Work Great

It Starts with You

Fourth, turn your attention to visibility into your progress. Con-
sider these questions:

• How do I know I’m making progress?
• How can I be sure I’m working on the right things?
• What confi dence do I have that I’ll meet my commitments?
• How often am I correct when I estimate my own completion
time?

These questions raise the issue of the rate at which you’re creating in
the network. You might talk with a colleague who has a role similar
to yours and compare notes regarding your personal monitoring pro-
cesses. Or you might seek the counsel of a mentor who has done your
job in the past and learn how he or she tracked progress.
Fifth are questions concerned with the resources you need:

• What materials or resources do I require?
• What funding will I need?
• Are the materials, resources, and funding available (that is, do
they exist)?
• Do I have control over the materials, resources, and funding? If
not, who does?

Here, you focus on what you need from the network and how you
will get it. You might seek to negotiate with a fellow manager for
the time and assistance of one of his direct reports on one of your
projects. While the starting point for the conversation might be a
request for help, it may turn out that the two of you manage employee
resource sharing in dissimilar ways, so a broader conversation about
the negotiation processes between you would be valuable.
Finally come questions about your capability:

• What functional knowledge do I have about how things work?
• What knowledge do I need?

62