BSBWOR501A Manage personal work priorities and professional development

Additional Activities (K Cole 4 Ed)

Chapter 8 Managing priorities
1. Form into groups of three with people you feel comfortable with. Offer feedback on each
others image. Confine your feedback to objective and non-evaluative statements. Some
areas you might want to ask for feedback on are:

How professional do I seem to you?

Does my attitude come across as proactive, positive and can do, or as reactive,
negative and blaming?

What could I do to seem more proactive, positive and can do?

Do I seem confident without blowing my own trumpet?

When offering feedback, cite examples to illustrate your points.

2. In small groups, write two realistic, SMARTT measures of success for each of the
following typical managerial key result areas:

Administration

Behaving with honesty and integrity

Continuous improvement

Customer relations

Leadership

Treating people with respect and courtesy

Using the organisations resources, including information, in a proper manner.

Which of the measures you have written are lead indicators and which are lag indicators?
Which would be more useful and why?
3. Pair up and, referring to Figure 8.2, decide what would be some typical tasks in each of
the four quadrants for students. Then discuss how to use the diagram to help you set
priorities and achieve results more easily.

4. Working in small groups, discuss in which of the four quadrants in Figure 8.2 should
managers aim to spend most of their time. What would prevent them from spending all of
their time working on important, non-urgent matters? List six to ten typical management
activities in each quadrant.
5. Working in small groups, read through the list of typical management crises below. How
would acting earlier, when the matter would have been important but not yet urgent, have
prevented each crisis? The first two are completed for you.
Crisis

Preventative action

A piece of equipment or a machine crashes.

Routine maintenance

An important deadline is missed.

Taking the time to make a plan

A key employee resigns or takes extended

sick leave and no one can cover for her.
You find your professional skills are out of date.
Someone has an accident.
An important deadline is missed because no one
realised that a key activity had not been completed.
6. How could a manager become trapped working on unimportant matters? In small groups,
list at least six reasons for working too much on unimportant, non-urgent matters, and six
reasons for working on unimportant, urgent matters.
7. From the efficiency techniques explained in the chapter, select one that you have not
used before. Use it conscientiously and consistently for the next three weeks and report
back to the class on its effectiveness. If you have developed any of your own efficiency
techniques, share these with the class, too.
8. Develop a simple monitoring system to keep you on track in your studies, following the
guidelines given in this chapter. Compare it with others in your class to see whether you
can learn any good ideas to improve your own system.