The Manager's Resource Handbook
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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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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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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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 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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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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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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21 Expert Tips for Increasing Workplace Productivity If boosting your department’s throughput were as easy as flipping a switch, every boss’s job would be infinitely simpler. Unfortunately, that’s far from reality. Further, as an old colleague of mine used to say, “Asking people to work harder is not a solution.” In the proven strategies that follow, we will illustrate how
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67 Brilliant Principles That Will Make You a Better Manager Every now and then we stumble upon a series of words which hold such powerful meaning and contain such genius that they remain with us for the rest of our lives. Such profound ideas may have jumped out at us from the inner pages of a book, the title of
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Overcoming the Common Fears Of Being a New Manager Early in my career, like many fresh graduates with great aspirations, I was eager to see where my professional life would take me. It was not long before I realized that I was likely on a path towards management. I was good with people, I didn’t mind speaking up, and colleagues seemed to come to me
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How to Prevent Employee Burnout From time to time we hear stories about people who have done the same thing for years, even decades. But, frankly, that’s quite rare these days. Today, few workers stay in their positions for more than a handful of years because they desire career growth or just get bored and want change. As managers, we are accustomed to talking about
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Can we be honest? No one really enjoys writing employee performance reviews. Not many managers take pleasure in tracking employee goals. And yet, everyone likes to see their organization and company flourish. For small businesses, the idea of introducing a framework for managing performance may seem like a waste of precious energy and time. I can see why that is the case.
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Teaching Employees How to Communicate Using the What? So What? Now What? Model How often does an employee give you a mountain of data that simply left asking yourself the question ‘So…what should I do with this information?’ Whether they come into your office to talk to you or they just send you an email, teaching employees to be better communicators is
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When I first started managing people, I used to think the idea of setting performance goals was, well, rather silly. I just thought that employees were responsible for doing the work assigned to them and completing tasks in their queue. That was how my own bosses had approached employee performance, so I just thought that was normal. Fortunately, it did not take
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