How to ace your first week as a manager

Your first week as a manager will likely be stressful and overwhelming. To give yourself the best start prepare thoroughly,  keep a cool head, don’t try to do too much and focus on accomplishing a few simple goals.

Suggested goals for your first week:

1. Complete any on-boarding activities and paperwork.
2. Make good first impressions.
3. Begin to get a lay of the land.
4. Bonus: help your manager and each team member in some small way.

That’s it! There’s no need to do more in Week 1.

How to accomplish these goals:

The first week is all about meeting with people and gathering information.

1. Introduce yourself to your team right away.

By doing this early in your first day, you’re sending your team members a powerful signal that they’re a top priority to you. Introduce yourself in a friendly and casual way, be interested in them as people, and tell them all that you’d like to meet with them individually over the coming week to learn more about them and their work, and hear their perspective on how things are going in your department.

2. Figure out which meetings to attend.

In your first day, ask your team and boss which meetings you should attend this week. Get them on your calendar. Take notes and try to soak up as much information and context as you can. Ask questions if you don’t understand something. People will be patient with you during your first few weeks.

3. Meet with your boss.

Start by trying to build personal rapport. Search for a common interest or some common ground. Then ask questions to learn more about your boss’s working style and expectations for the job. A few good questions to try are:

• “What are you expectations of me and my team?”
• “What are you hoping that I focus on, and why?”
• “How would you like me to work with you?”
• “What’s working well here?”
• “What are three things you would change if you could, and why?”
• “What questions do you have for me?”
• “Who else should I talk to?”

4. If you’re given an assignment, give it your best effort.

First impressions count for a lot so make sure you knock your first assignments out of the park, even if they are trivial.

5. Hold your first team meeting.

Your new team will probably be as nervous about getting a new manager as you are about becoming one. Bring everyone together to establish rapport, set people at ease and start the process of exploring ideas and expectations together. Be upfront and receptive. As James Burgess advises, “Get to know your team, and be sure to let them get to know you, too!” You will also learn a lot by observing how your team members interact as a group.

You could set the stage by introducing yourself again and letting the team know you’ll be meeting with each member individually, but that first you want everyone to have an honest conversation about questions and concerns. Listen carefully and actively, and at this stage in the game, avoid making any grand pronouncements or decisions.

What will your team want to know about you? In The New Boss, Peter Fischer identifies some questions you might hear, as well as the subtext that probably lies behind each:

• “How long are you staying?” Subtext: Is it worth adapting to you? And are you just going to use us as a springboard to the next step?
• “What do you do when you’re not at work?” Subtext: Are you human?
• “How did you end up in the position?” Subtext: Did you deserve this promotion or did you get it through connections?
• “What did you do before?” Subtext: Are you up to the task?
• “What do you plan to do next?” Subtext: What changes are you going to spring on us?

6. Meet with each team member individually.

Build rapport by finding a common interest or some common ground. Show interest in each team member as a person, without overdoing it (it’s important to also respect boundaries and avoid “interrogating” people). Then transition to a set of general questions to help you learn more about the general situation:

• “What are you expectations of me?”
• “What are you hoping that I focus on, and why?”
• “How do you like to communicate?”
• “What’s working well here?”
• “What are three things you would change if you could, and why?”
• “What questions do you have for me?”
• “Who else should I talk to?”

7. Set up recurring weekly 1-on-1s with each team member.

Schedule weekly recurring 30-minute meetings with each team member through the next six months. Explain that the 1-on-1s are not status updates, but rather open-ended conversations to talk about the week and any issues or opportunities that have come up, and to provide support with professional development.

8. Schedule meetings with other stakeholders.

Whom should you talk to? Schedule time with managers and leaders of other teams, customers, distributors, service providers and anyone else who seems even remotely relevant.

Tip 1: Don’t overlook those whose job titles aren’t particularly lofty. Sometimes administrative staff members and customer service representatives know more about the true state of things than anyone else. And their ideas can be just as good as a vice president’s or CEO’s!

What should you talk about? Don’t get too hung up on protocol, but do try to ask the same basic questions of everyone and listen for recurring themes as well as differing views. Take good notes. Here are some sample questions:

• “What’s working well here?”
• “What are three things you would change if you could, and why?”
• “What are you hoping that I focus on, and why?”
• “What questions do you have for me?”
• “Who else should I talk to?”

Tip 2: Hold these meetings in other people’s offices, if possible. Why? It’s a golden opportunity to learn more about the people you’ll be working with. Do they display family pictures, sports memorabilia, diplomas? Or are the walls bare? Is your supervisor’s desk messy or neat? Take it all in and use what you learn to build rapport (e.g., “I’m a Red Sox fan, too. Hope they can pull it together in time for the playoffs.”), as well as assess working styles and preferences.

9. Model the behavior you’d like to see.

Whether you realize it or not, your team will be both consciously and unconsciously following your example. What messages do you want to send? For example, if you want your team to work hard, you should work hard, too — and Week 1 isn’t too early to start.

At the same time, don’t overdo it. If you stay until 9 p.m. every night and send emails all weekend, your team members will feel pressure to do so, too. Be conscious of their personal needs and time.

10. Be aware of, but try not to worry about, any pressing projects or crises.

Get used to it: There’s almost always something to worry about when you’re a manager! Although it’s important to begin noticing what will demand your attention in the near future, don’t neglect the mission-critical step of using your newbie status to talk to others and get a lay of the land. If you put your head down too early, you’ll miss the big-picture view. And that’s the view that matters most when you’re a manager.

https://tinyurl.com/28xfwrcv

How to Make Yourself More Valuable to Your Boss

 

Excerpted from The New Psychology for Managing People
By Mortimer R. Feinberg et al

• Be a source of good current information. — Industrial psychologists have noted that the higher a man goes in an organization, the more insulated he may become from what is going on.  Partly this is a matter of choice; he does not want to involve himself in everything. Partly it is an inevitable result of the broad nature of his responsibility, and partly it is because people tend not to tell the top man what is going on. You can be a source of pertinent information to your boss, but make sure it is information, not gossip. And make sure it does not in any way reflect upon the performance of others. Sometimes, just a brief anecdote about something that occurred at a departmental meeting can give your boss a valuable feel for what is happening in an area that has become increasingly remote from him.

• Cover his area of least interest. — Your boss is not equally skilled at all facets of his responsibility—no man is. Nor is he equally interested in all facets of it. As you get to know him, you can come to a pretty accurate determination of certain areas that, while important, do not intrigue him. To the extent that you can handle these areas for him, he will welcome your help, come to rely more heavily upon your judgment, and recognize the fact that your efforts are increasing the overall effectiveness of the operation.

• Anticipate. — Routine subordinates wait for the boss to give them instructions or direction, and then react. This wastes time and places a great burden on the boss. As you come to know your boss and the operation, try to develop the ability to anticipate what the boss is going to want and need. At first, make a few “dry runs”; anticipate and then see how well your anticipations work out in practice. Then, when you are able to, anticipate and move. When you conclude that the boss is going to want to move in a certain direction, begin to pull together materials that will assist him in his decisions. Prepare the ground for him. He will recognize it and appreciate it.

• Exercise Tact. — There may be times when you have every reason to be justified in raising hell with a colleague. You may go ahead and do it, and a fair-minded superior will have to agree that you are right. But agreeing that you are right does not necessarily mean that he appreciates what you are doing. Use your judgment in difficult situations. It may be best to hold back from “rocking the boat” for the simple reason that if you do, you will just be making a boss’s already tough job immeasurably more complicated and difficult.

• Be Willing to take on the Dirty Jobs. — Status is important to all of us. As a manager moves higher in the organization, he may well feel that he is no longer to involve himself in some of the more unpleasant tasks that were incumbent upon him at a lower level. And he is probably quite right in feeling this way. Nevertheless, “dirty jobs” do come up, and they have to be handled. The manager who is willing to step in and handle them, even when his status does not require it, is a manager who will be particularly valued by his boss.

https://bitly.ws/3e4U2

The four keys to establishing your leadership

 

Excerpted from The New Psychology for Managing People
By Mortimer R. Feinberg et al

1. Establish your leadership by imprinting your policy, your authority, and your style on subordinates.
2. Evaluate the degree to which you are establishing yourself on each individual.
3. Estimate the tenure of the key individuals who will be carrying on your program.
4. Appraise your training plan according to the new systems approach.

https://sliwainsights.com/

All the right moves by Anna Muoio

 

An interesting article from FAST COMPANY Issue 30 April 1999 explaining how the lessons from Chess might be useful as a strategy in life and/or business.  Some key points include:

• If you see a good idea, look for a better one.
• Great players want to build their position and to increase their power.  Play for control of the situation.
• To win big, think different.
• Small advantages produce big results
• Mind games are part of the game
• Never let ’em see you sweat
• Mental toughness requires physical stamina
• To learn how to win, learn how to lose

Article:  link

How Long Does It Take To Rank on Google?

 

SAM NELSON

Ah, the almighty Google search box.

Website developers spend a lot of time trying to make sure their pages show up directly beneath that box, at the top of Google’s first page of search results.

Reaching the top of the search rankings does not happen overnight, especially for small businesses with little or no existing web presence.

According to multiple sources, the average time for websites to rank on Google through optimization (SEO) techniques is about three to six months.

That’s right – jumping to the front of Google’s results usually takes between 90-180 days, depending on the competitiveness of your industry and popularity of your keywords. For several reasons we’ll discuss below (competition, domain age, content accumulation, etc.) a high ranking may take as much as a year in competitive fields.

This can be frustrating for developers and clients alike. We just put weeks into building a new site! It looks great and no one is seeing it! Why isn’t Google recognizing us?

Don’t worry. In this case, doing everything right doesn’t mean immediate results. Ranking on Google is a process, not a magic trick.

To understand which websites appear at the top of Google‘s rankings, first, we need to dive into how Google finds those pages and adds them to your search results.

How Does Google Find My Page?

Software programs called “Googlebots” (also known as bots, robots, or spiders) move or “crawl” through billions of web pages, collecting and cataloging information that is added to Google’s index of the web. For your webpage to reach Google’s index, the spiders must be able to crawl and read the information on your site.

This video from Google explains in more detail how the search function works:

Like the nice man in the pink shirt says, when you search through Google, you are actually searching the Google index, not the whole Internet. Google uses an algorithm to match your query to the bazillion pages it has on file.

The algorithm considers more than 250 factors, including keywords, titles, and content tags. The algorithm also incorporates PageRank, a separate program that measures each page’s importance according to the amount and quality of traffic from other sites.

How Are Websites Ranked?

When you type a search into Google, pages are selected from the index according to how well they match up to your specific query.

There is no exact formula for placing your website at the top of a Google search. However, the following factors play a key role in the ranking process:

• SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ensures that your website is visible to Googlebots and other indexing programs. This includes things like titles, keywords, headings, and ALT image text.
• Domain age. A web domain less than six months old is considered a “new” site, and therefore less trustworthy or reliable than an older website that has been thoroughly verified. New sites can still be ranked, but rankings are more likely to increase after the six-month window.
• Keyword competition. Words or phrases that are searched often are highly competitive, and more established sites in your industry have a head start on ranking for popular searches. If your site is new, it will be easier to build trust and rankings through keywords with lower levels of competition before moving on to more popular searches.
• Content quality. The Googlebots are designed to identify characteristics like how often new content is published, whether the content is original, as well as the length and overall quality of your posts. Regularly adding new, original, high-quality content to your page will keep the search bots looking at your page, and could lead to higher rankings as time passes.
• Clean domain. Google’s algorithm is also designed to spot when websites try to cheat the system with tricks like keyword stuffing or buying inbound links. These schemes may work for a while, but when Google catches on, your site will be penalized. Your ranking will suffer until you correct the problem, which can be a lengthy and difficult process.

(Hat tip: reliablesoft.net)

So if you’re maintaining your page with good content, keeping your domain clear of any shady shortcuts, and focusing on low-competition keywords that will build your online authority… be patient.

You’re on your way.

https://websitemuscle.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-rank-on-google/

How long does it take to rank in Google? (A study by Ahrefs)

Tim Soulo

If you’re doing client SEO, I guess every new client, without any exceptions, will ask you this question: 

“How long till my website (page) ranks on top of Google?”

The common response to this question is obviously, “It depends,” because there are just too many variables to consider: website strength, competition, budget, skills, etc.

But here at Ahrefs, we decided to sift through the petabytes of historical ranking data that we have and give you a slightly more quantifiable answer, something more concrete than simply, “It depends.”

How old are the top-ranking pages?

For starters, we identified how old the current top-ranking pages are.

We took 2 million random keywords and pulled data on the Top10 ranking pages for each of them. Which resulted in this beautiful graph:

SIDENOTE.

 The “age” is calculated from the date when Ahrefs crawlers first saw the page. But since we crawl the web at a pretty staggering speed, the actual age of the page should be very close, if not identical, to our records. 

As you can tell from this graph, the average Top10 ranking page is 2+ years old. And those that rank at position #1 are almost 3 years old (on average).

In fact, only 22% of pages that currently rank in the Top10 were created within 1 year:

So the next thing we wanted to know is what percentage of pages at each ranking position were less than 1 year old:

This doesn’t look too promising, right? The SERP is clearly dominated by “old” pages.

How long does it take for a page to rank in Google?

To answer this question, we randomly selected 2 million pages that were first seen by Ahrefs crawler a year ago.

We then tracked the position history of each page for any keyword it’s ranked for.

Which resulted in this graph:

Only 5.7% of all studied pages ranked in the Top10 search results within 1 year for at least 1 keyword.

Pages from websites with a high Domain Rating (DR) performed way better than those with a low DR. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise, because Ahrefs’ Domain Rating metric (shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile) correlates well with Google rankings.

We then zoomed into these 5.7% of “lucky” pages to see how quickly they got from nowhere to the Top10.

The majority of them managed to achieve that in approximately 61-182 days.

By looking at this graph, you might think that, on average, it takes a page anywhere from 2-6 months to rank in Google’s Top10.

But that conclusion isn’t valid here, because this data only represents the 5.7% of pages that were lucky enough to rank in the Top10 within a year — while almost 95% of all the pages we studied didn’t make it to the Top10 within that timeframe.

We also re-calculated the numbers based on monthly search volume of the keywords:

Only 0.3% of pages ranked in the Top10 for a high-volume keyword in less than a year.

And here are the dynamics of these 5.7% “lucky” pages, broken down by search volume of the keyword that they ranked for:

Clearly, you can rank for low-volume keywords in a very short time, while the high-volume ones take almost a year to get into the Top10.

But again, don’t forget that this data only applies to 5.7% of “lucky” pages that ranked in the Top10 within a year. The vast majority of pages don’t perform that well.

What does this all mean?

Did our study give a definite answer to “how long does it take to rank” question?

No.

But at least we’ve shown that almost 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the Top10 within a year.

And most of the “lucky” ones, which do manage to get there, do it in about 2-6 months.

Actually, I shouldn’t be framing these pages as “lucky,” because the reason they got to the Top10 in less than a year is most likely hard work and great knowledge of SEO, not luck.

Check out these tips from Sam Oh if you want to rank #1 in Google quicker:

Here’s to hard work and dedication!

https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-rank/

For optimal productivity, be on break for 20-25% of the workday

 

Takeaway:

For optimal productivity, we should rest for around 20-30 minutes for every 90 minutes we work. This sounds like a lot, but three separate studies back up this amount of time.

The other day, reviewing research on how long our work breaks should be, I noticed a curious connection. Three separate studies indicated essentially the same thing: we should be on break for 20-25% of our day for optimal energy and productivity.

Two studies conducted in 2014 and 2021 by Desktime (a time tracking app) found that their most productive users were on break for this proportion of the day. The 2014 study found that their most productive users were on break for 17 minutes every 52 minutes they worked—in other words, 25% of the day, in other words. Mid-pandemic, in 2021, their most productive users were on break for an average of 26 minutes for every 112 minutes of work—19% of the day.

A third study found that our energy naturally moves in a similar rhythm throughout the day. Most of the day, we oscillate between periods of wakefulness and sleepiness. We typically experience around 20 to 30 minutes of tiredness for every 90-minute period of higher energy. That’s roughly 18-25% of the day that our body naturally wants to rest. 

Taken together, these studies seem to suggest that 20-25% of the day is the sweet spot for breaks—especially if you’re trying to optimize your productivity level or accommodate the natural rhythms of your body and mind. 

While this sounds like a lot of time, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. If you’ve tried the Pomodoro technique, you’ve already worked with this rhythm. With the technique, you focus on something for 25 minutes, then take a five-minute break. After the first break, you repeat the same rhythm three more times, taking an extended break after the fourth focus session—the official website recommends around 20 minutes for this longer break. This equals 25% of the day—more if you decide to take an even longer break at the end, as many do. 

Another way to look at these numbers: Being on break for 20% of an eight-hour day is equivalent to a one-hour lunch break, plus one 18-minute break in the morning and afternoon. 25% of the day is a one-hour lunch break, with another hour of breaks distributed throughout the day. That’s a good amount of time, but as I’ve written in the past, when we’re on break, our mind continues working—especially when we give it a chance to wander. 

Working with this knowledge, I’ve started to track how many minutes I focus for—and then just multiply that number by 25% to figure out how long to break for when I feel the need to—or when I can. The longer I work, the longer the break I get. 

Your mileage will vary, of course. But remember that 20-25% of the day seems to be the sweet spot for both energy and productivity.

Written by Chris Bailey

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Want to become more productive? Stop multitasking

 

According to a recent study, when you multitask, you are not being more productive – you just feel more emotionally satisfied from your work.1 That’s why multitasking is so fun. You feel like you’re getting a lot done because you jump between a large number of things, but you’re really being less productive than if you just focused on one thing at a time.

“If you’re, say, trying to listen to someone one the phone while typing an email”, says cognitive psychologist David Meyer at the University of Michigan, “something has to give”.2

There are a ton of impacts multitasking has on your productivity. Here are five of the main ones I’ve come across:

1. It makes you more prone to errors, because you devote less focus to all of the balls you’re trying to juggle at one time. When you do more than one thing at once, you don’t focus on anything to your full capacity.
2. It actually takes longer. When you switch from one activity to another, it takes time “to re-immerse your mind in one topic or another”.3 These are called “switching costs”, and you incur them every time you switch from one task to another.
3. It severely affects your performance. For one example, in a study with young students, multitasking led “to spottier, shallower, less flexible learning”.4
4. It affects your memory. Studies have shown that when you try to focus on too many things at one time, you are less likely to be able to differentiate between what’s important and what isn’t.5 Maybe that’s why you forgot why you just walked into the kitchen.
5. It adds stress to your life. Your electronics should exist for your convenience; not the convenience of everyone else in the world. Allowing other people to shatter your focus by constantly interrupting you may be stimulating and entertaining, but it will make you less productive since you have less control over your environment.

From everything I’ve read, multitasking will almost always make you less productive. That said, there are a few tips to

• Only multitask with simple, habitual tasks, like doing the dishes while you listen to a podcast. This is because your mind can lean on your habits to get the mechanical stuff done while your mind focuses on something more productive.
• Minimize distractions. Technology “creates a major expansion of the targets for your focus and a potential drain on its finite resources”.6 By minimizing the distractions around you (instant messaging alerts, text message vibrations, email notifications, and so on), you can improve your focus and become better at unitasking.
• Meditate. Meditation works out your “attention muscle”, which lets you focus better on the task at hand when you’re trying to unitask. I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to use meditation to become more productive here.
• Check your email on a schedule. Especially if you receive a high volume of email, checking it on a schedule means that you won’t be inundated with alerts and notifications all day. People can wait an hour or two for a response.
• Know that your brain can’t actually multitask. You may feel like you’re doing more than one thing at once, “but what you’re really doing is switching back and forth between activities”.7 According to one brain researcher, “there are fundamental biological limits to what the brain can pay attention to. This is a problem built into the brain”.
• Music is a-okay. According to Stanford professor Clifford Nass, music is “a little different. We have a special part of our brain for music, so we can listen to music while we do other things”.

It’s very difficult to stop multitasking – every day I have the urge to check my email, twitter feeds, and text messages when I’m doing something productive (like writing this blog post), just for the emotional stimulation it will give me. That said, I think it’s worth pushing back against it in the end because of how much more productive it makes you.

1. Source: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/multitask.htm ↩

2. Source: RAPT, by Winifred Gallagher. ↩

3. Source: http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/18/18322435-students-cant-resist-distraction-for-two-minutes-and-neither-can-you?lite ↩

4. Source: http://anniemurphypaul.com/2013/05/the-epidemic-of-media-multitasking-while-learning/# ↩

5. Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html ↩

6. Source: RAPT, by Winifred Gallagher. ↩

7. Source: RAPT, by Winifred Gallagher. ↩

Written by Chris Bailey

https://cutt.ly/Y43WWVG