Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
Activities, Conversations and Best-Practices For Getting Your New Employee Engaged Quickly You’ve just hired a new employee. Great! Now what? Hiring new employees is an exciting time – you’re expanding your team, your department’s capacity increases, and your staff gets to forge new relationships. When we bring on a new staffer, though, making a good impression is critical for creating
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MRH Mailbag: Advice from Our Experts When I first began leading and managing a team, I was caught off guard by the number of unique and unusual challenges I faced on a daily basis. In the span of a given week, I found myself addressing everything from budget issues, to personnel matters, to customer inquiries. No two days were alike.
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Even Bad Managers Can Teach Us How to Be Good Leaders Over the span of a career, most people will accumulate dozens of bosses and supervisors. During this time, everyone inevitably gets to work for some great leaders and will have the misfortune of working for some really bad bosses. I used to think that one only learned from the
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Tracked Vs. Unlimited Vacation – The Pros and Cons As the year comes to a close, I find myself running a department that has been operating at about 50% capacity for the past few months. Just like you, as a result of the global health crisis we’ve all ensured, every employee in my department cancelled plans for vacations and holidays
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A Playbook for Skip-Level Meetings: Questions to Ask and How to Get Engagement Skip-level meetings are an important component of managing a healthy organization. Alongside things like town hall discussions and employee surveys, regular skip-level meetings are an integral part of the standard feedback loop that helps leaders understand internal challenges and identify areas for improvement. In particular, the skip-level meeting
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Developing Your Own Succession Plan Succession planning is a fundamental part of building a leadership path for talented employees. As leaders move up, move on, or move out of the business, a good succession plan at the organizational level identifies the pipeline of individuals who are ready to fill future open roles and vacancies. But what about developing your own
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9 Tips for Supervising Frustrated Employees in Tough Times Managing a team is tough business. Meeting deadlines, tracking budgets, developing your staff and managing employee performance are just some of the things we are responsible for. Outside factors and difficult customers add to the stress, but the role becomes infinitely more difficult when the team you’re managing is noticeably unhappy.
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How to Make Sure Customer Requests Don’t Eat Up Your Profits When you bid on a new project, you make assumptions, estimate your costs, factor in some potential risks and contingency funds, and add profit. But inevitably, your customer asks for more and the scope, schedule and requirements begin to drift, increasing your costs and resource demands. If you try
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What to Include in a Business Operating System A business operating system is a comprehensive, cross-functional framework that helps managers standardize and execute their organization’s mission. Further, a business operating system, or BOS, creates a unified way of doing things, from product development, to marketing activities, to how the organization interacts with its customers. An effective BOS will also define
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Examples and Tradeoffs of Different Performance Metrics in Business Metrics are a core component of any small business that is looking to grow and strengthen over time. If there is one thing that holds true for any performance measure, however, it is that metrics drive behavior – good or bad. Deciding what to measure is of utmost important because no
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10 Core Components of Thinking Strategically In management and leaderships ranks, we often talk about the need to think and act strategically. We even tell our employees to do the same thing. But many managers struggle to explain what this really means or how employees can improve their strategic thinking skills. In truth, you can’t just tell your employees to
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A Tutorial to Ensure You Meet Your Customer’s Needs and Don’t Forget the Details You’re about to wrap up a big project. You are proud of the work you’ve done, and you believe you covered everything the customer asked. Afterall, you spent a lot of time on it and you’re pretty sure the customer will be happy with it. But
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Don’t Let Your Project Fail: Practical Solutions for Small Business Even with a strong business case and what may be a routine scope, there are several pitfalls that can ruin great projects at any time. These challenges can adversely impact projects led by both first-time program managers, who may not be prepared enough for what lies ahead, as well as
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A Manager’s Best Practices for Leading Remote Employees: Out of Sight, But Not Out of Mind We used to joke, Andy and I, about how the only time he ever saw his team was when he traveled half way around the world to meet with a customer in Japan. “I have to fly to the other side of the globe
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How to Supervise People Who Struggle to Meet Dates Whether they report to you directly or they are assigned to your program, employees who won’t say ‘no’ and overcommit themselves will eventually miss a critical deadline. In extreme cases, this employee behavior can even threaten the success of an entire project. As competent and dedicated as they may be, staff
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11 Tips for Managing Quiet Employees As the old saying goes, sometimes it’s like pulling teeth. You have an employee who hardly speaks – barely utters a word – and you never quite feel like you’re connected. You know the one I’m talking about. Managing quiet employees can be extremely difficult if not flat out frustrating. These employees often prefer
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8 Ways to Improve Customer Service In Small Business As consumers, we each have a story about the time we were treated like royalty just for buying a cup of coffee. And, unfortunately, we all have a memory or two about that time when we weren’t pampered at all, even when making a large purchase. So, what is good customer
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9 Expert Tips For Holding People Accountable…. And Micromanaging is Not One of Them From a manager’s perspective, accountability is a cornerstone of an effective organization. After all, when accountability is a core value of a business, people do what they say, they meet their commitments, and staffers are willing to fess up when they’ve made a mistake –
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At one point or another, virtually every business must adapt to changing times. In some instances, your product offering becomes stagnant. Perhaps your competitor has unveiled something new and is taking market share away from you. And, from time to time, technology advancements will make your current products and services obsolete. In all cases, we as business leaders must respond in such
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Holding one on one meetings with your staff is an essential component of the manager-employee relationship. These discussions serve as a vehicle for providing coaching, giving performance feedback, and sharing general career insight. To get a real assessment of what’s going on, though, you need the employee to do the talking. Easier said than done! Despite the list of topics managers should discuss,
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