ITList Information Technology Blog » Strengths And Weaknesses http://itlist.com Current IT field related information Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:40:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 Sharpen your Management Skill http://itlist.com/sharpen-your-management-skill/ http://itlist.com/sharpen-your-management-skill/#comments Sun, 26 Sep 2010 23:37:59 +0000 bikram http://itlist.com/sharpen-your-management-skill/ Being an effective manager, a leader, a motivator isn’t an easy task. In day to day pressing deadlines and work pressure keeping up the managerial effectiveness gets difficult. But a good manager can’t afford to bend down. He has to get the work done by his teams, create a good work environment, inspire all, and keep up the work flow.

Here are some tips to keep up the great managerial skill.

Set goals, draw routes to achieve them

As a manager you should be aware of company’s mission, vision, values and goals. To achieve them set small job oriented goals, which are realistic, achievable, and measurable. Now develop a comprehensive plan, illustrating steps to be taken to achieve those goals. Allocate work to the concerned people, coordinate all. Keep track of the projects, progress status and problems faced. Prioritize projects too, marking them as per immediacy. Call for frequent staff meetings, keep the deadlines before them, provide them with the required information, make objectives clear, and clarify doubts. Be a constant support system to them.

Analyze employees, increase their productivity

Judge your employees. Analyze their skills, interests, goals, strengths, and weaknesses. Once you can analyze employees, assign relevant assignments to them; which match with their competence. Your concern towards them will keep them interested, involved and feel valued. Allocation of appropriate work will also maximize their productivity, enhance quality of performance, and make the entire work enjoyable. When employees find you care for them, they also work harder and are motivated to excel.

Provide necessary resources and support the employees

Provide your employees with all kind of support, in terms of information and tools required, resources required, environment for work, appraisal on completion with success, encouragement and moral support. You have to look after everything from stationary items to project submission. Improve work culture of the company. Make the work enjoyable, not burden.

Make the work place unbiased, adhering to equity and fairness

A good honest employee can never excel in a work place which is full of conflicts, biased towards few, doesn’t recognize talent and hard work, and encourages office politics. Treat all in equal way. Make sure all have equal access to information, tools, and resources. Interact with all in same manner, with due respect and care. Be consistent with your actions. Lend your ear to all.

Don’t forget to appreciate before all

Don’t forget to appreciate the ones who excel. A heartfelt appraisal will not only boost confidence, but also make the employees feel valued, recognized, and motivated. Cheer for him, praise him before all. It will also set an example for others to follow.

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How to Boost your Self-Esteem? http://itlist.com/how-to-boost-your-self-esteem/ http://itlist.com/how-to-boost-your-self-esteem/#comments Sat, 25 Sep 2010 13:29:17 +0000 bikram http://itlist.com/how-to-boost-your-self-esteem/ It’s not uncommon that many people constantly suffer from low self-esteem. At times people feel inferior and suffer from sheer depression because they don’t have much wealth, good clothes, sense of fashion or etiquette, good pronunciation etc. But they don’t realize the worth of being a good human. A good self-esteem, an ideal self is actually within you, may be dormant. You need to awaken it, stir it, and make life worth living.

Here are some tips.

Talk to yourself in front of the mirror

Self help is the best help. Try to talk to yourself. In our subconscious mind we do analyze ourselves, converse with self. Talk to yourself in front of the mirror. Treat yourself respectfully. Realize self worth, self weaknesses. Praise yourself, ridicule yourself. Preach yourself, scare yourself. Treat yourself as your best friend. Talk good things in front of the mirror. Say it loud enough to believe in it.

Analyze your strengths and use them

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Try to realize them and admit too. Admitting own weaknesses makes it easier to improve them. What’s more important is finding out own strengths and making them so strong that weaknesses appear negligible and small. Make the sunshine look so radiant, that people ignore the darkness following.

Follow others whom you admire

There’s no harm in following footsteps of the people, you admire. It’s those qualities which make him appreciated, admired. So why not follow them? Jot down the qualities you admire. Next, set your goal and action path. Set small goals, which can be measured. As you start working towards them and reaching small goals, your self confidence will boost up automatically.

Don’t compare yourself with others

Don’t compare yourself with others. Every human is different. There may be people who are better looking, better skilled or better paid. But don’t compare, it’s self defeating act. You may have many talents which others won’t possess. Be yourself, love yourself.

Recall your success

When you really feel low just recall your success, the moments when all flattered you to the core. Store those precious moments in your heart and cherish. It will hike your self esteem. If your share of failures has been more than success, just know that there’s always light at the end of the tunnel. Do the good deed, success will follow.

Make sure you are surrounded by optimists

Avoid people who spread negativity. If you are surrounded by such people their pessimism, cynical attitude will also get absorbed into you. Choose positive, helpful, fun-loving people. Positive energy will find space within you too.

Now, feel the change in your self esteem.

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3 Marketing Tools for Small Business http://itlist.com/3-marketing-tools-for-small-business/ http://itlist.com/3-marketing-tools-for-small-business/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:12:33 +0000 bikram http://itlist.com/?p=2142 A small business differs from a big business largely on the scale of operation. A small business does everything that a big business does but only on the smaller scale with a more personal touch to the activity. Still, there are tools of big business that a small business can also use. In this article, I will talk about 3 such tools. How you use these tools will determine how much you succeed in your marketing effort.

SWOT

SWOT stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and threat. Strength and weakness is internal to the product, whereas, opportunity and threats are external to the product. We use this matrix to find out strengths and weaknesses of our product, see what opportunity (matching our ability) the market is presenting, and gauge the threats presented by the market.

PLC

PLC stands for Product Life Cycle. A PLC study of your product gives you an idea about what stage your product is in, and what marketing channel and strategy to use. We divide PLC in following parts: introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline.

Introduction is the phase when the product is introduced to the market, and the organization is striving to create awareness about the product. Profit in this phase is either negative or low.

Growth is the phase in which the product gets acceptance, which results in increase in sales. Profits are high in this phase, and to cash in on the momentum the product has got, organization tends to invest some advertising dollars.

Maturity is the phase when sales start slowing down because most of the buyers have your product. Sales and profit has already passed its peak. Sales and profit may not be increasing but they are steady.

Some marketers divide this phase into early maturity and late maturity to figure out how close the product is to decline phase.

Decline is the phase when sales and profit both starts falling. It could be because the need of the market has changed and some better product is fulfilling that need, or because some other product is meeting the same need at lower cost.

From this phase either the product dies out in oblivion, or get reinvented, reintroduced and pushed on the growth track.

PESTEL

Some call it PEST while other calls it PESTEL. I have taken PESTEL because it is more complete a matrix then PEST. PESTEL is a macro-environment scanning matrix that helps a business find out how the various external factors going to affect it. PESTEL Stands for:

P: Political factors (Policy changes and how it is going to affect you)

E: Economic factors (economic growth, exchange rates, inflation, interest rates, and taxation changes are going to affect your business)

S: Social factors (How does social changes like, education, demographic, occupational, etc., going to affect you)

T: Technological factors (How advent of new technology will affect your business)

E: Environmental factors (How change in climate or rising temperature can affect your business)

L: Legal Factors (how change in legal environment going to affect your low. How much will your business suffer if the carbon emission level is set lower, and government pension plan is made mandatory for every organization, regardless of size?)

PEST matrix analyzes all the factors we discussed above except for the last two.

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Learning To Edit http://itlist.com/learning-to-edit/ http://itlist.com/learning-to-edit/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:13:22 +0000 SamElli http://itlist.com/?p=1586 Learning to edit is one of the most important aspects of writing.  As most people will tell you, good writing is in the editing.  It’s not what you want to write, but how you write that makes the largest difference in how your readers will perceive you.  By properly editing a piece you can ensure that you make your points, and maintain an entertaining as well as informative writing style.  That’s the key in the end, you need to titillate as well as inform, if you want people to keep up with what you’re writing.  The key to that always will be reworking your first drafts.

Good writing should be as concise and always to the point as possible.  When you write too much fluff your readers tend to shut off their brains, or worse, get bored and stop reading altogether.  You first edit should focus on how you can take what you’ve written, and formulate it into a shorter piece of work that tells the same story.  Nobody wants to read over inflated paragraphs or multiple sentences that make the same point.

After that, learn your strengths and weaknesses.  If you’re not very descriptive, make sure you spend extra editing time ensuring that your moments of description are fleshed out well enough.  You can’t be too vague, but you also don’t want to over describe to make up for your weakness.  Also learning the areas that you tend to need work on will allow you to target where you should go first when editing a piece.

Get as much feedback from third party sources as possible.  Get a friend to read what you’ve written, or a coworker, or even a family member.  Someone that will provide you with good honest criticism.  We all need honest criticism so that we can grow as people, and writing is no different.  In fact writing ability hinges on your ability to get effective criticism, and incorporate it into your style to become a better writer on the whole.

Finally, always give your piece a read through backwards.  This is especially helpful for noticing little grammatical errors, or punctuation mistakes.  By reading backwards your brain doesn’t concentrate on what the writing means, but just on the words and characters themselves.  This affords you the opportunity to avoid being engaged in what your writing says, instead focusing on how you’ve written each individual portion.

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Being A Better Worker http://itlist.com/being-a-better-worker/ http://itlist.com/being-a-better-worker/#comments Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:55:55 +0000 SamElli http://itlist.com/?p=1575 Being a better worker is all about time management.  We all have a ridiculous amount of things to get to in one day, and sometimes that mountain can look pretty insurmountable, but keeping on top of it isn’t impossible.  Plus once you do get your day under control you’ll find yourself being a much more productive worker, and that’s better for you and your company.

-Firstly, organize everything.  Don’t just make sure that your work environment is well organized and neat, but make sure that your day follows suit.  Set aside time for phone calls and checking your email so that you don’t get bogged down trying to keep up with both, as either could end up dominating your day and interfering with how much actual work you are able to get done for that day.

-Secondly, don’t fall into the work distraction pitfalls.  These include mostly bringing in aspects of your personal life to work.  Such as browsing the internet, making personal calls, having a non-work related conversation with coworkers.  All of these are huge time wasters and will significantly cut into how much work you are able to complete each day.

-Thirdly, try using one single planner for all of your daily goals and activities.  This way you’re never confused or having to check more than one place to keep yourself organized.

-Fourthly, figure out your work strengths and weaknesses, and be completely honest in your self assessment.  This way you can focus on your strengths in a clinch to get work done and done well, and also be aware of your weaknesses so that they do not dominate your performances.  By pointing out your weaknesses you can become a more complete and better worker.

-Finally, know when to take a break.  It’s unhealthy for your body to sit down for long periods of time, as it constricts blood flow to different parts of the body.  Every 60-90 minutes you should be taking a quick 5-10 minute break where you stand up and take a few steps, either to walk away from your desk for a moment or to just walk around your office.  Your mind and body will feel much better, and in the end you’ll get more work done because of that.

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