The Manager's Resource Handbook
Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
Promoting Skill Development of Your Human Resources Employee development is a hot topic in today’s human resource and executive management circles, and rightly so. Companies are investing more and more time and energy into building organizational strength through the capabilities of their employees. It’s been said for some time that a company’s greatest asset is its people. And now, firms have
» Read more
8 Questions To Help You Delegate Many managers take on too much because they don’t know to delegate work effectively. They are told they should delegate more, but still struggle to do it. I was definitely in this category when I first became a manager, and always struggled to ask for help. Often times, you’ll hear employees say something like this:
» Read more
A happy employee is a productive employee. A happy team is a productive team. This may be a simple way to describe how an organization benefits from employee engagement, but creating job satisfaction for one’s staff can frustrate even the most experienced of managers. And yet, employee engagement can be the difference maker between seeing your business flourish, and watching only disappointing results trickle in. Additionally, a disengaged staff can lead
» Read more
Organizational Health: 5 Things Your Employees May Be Telling You Have you ever really paid attention to what your employees are telling you? After all, employee behavior is often a sign of organizational health. Sometimes they may ask unusual questions that make you scratch your forehead. Other times, their non-verbal behavior in the workplace can say a lot about a business or
» Read more
How to Coach and Develop Your Employees As managers, one of our primary responsibilities is to mentor and coach employees. Employee development is a big deal because after all, it contributes directly to organizational performance and can also influence employee retention. While mentoring and coaching can often take place in short spurts during informal meetings or in hallway encounters, there
» Read more
Everyday, our employees make commitments and take actions to complete various job-related tasks. Sometimes this is in response to the responsibilities that we, their managers, assign. However, in many cases the actions they take are simply the result of their own duties: talking with customers, meeting with colleagues, or in support of a given project. Regardless of the
» Read more
Managing Employees Who Are Older Than You I first began managing other people in my mid 20’s. I worked at a Fortune 500 company with over 150,000 employees and was given a small team to lead. Of the five team members, most were close to me in age, and whom I had few concerns as their supervisor. Then there was
» Read more Does Admitting Your Mistakes Make You a Bad Manager? A hot-tempered conference call had just ended. I stepped out of my office to get some fresh air. At the water cooler I ran into a peer, a fellow manager, who had also been on the conference call. “Wow, that was intense” she said. “Yeah. I don’t get why he just won’t let it
» Read more
Create Slides That Manage Your Message Every organization holds periodic management reviews of current programs, projects and initiatives. We have all experienced them: we share the current financial outlook of a project compared to the initial plan, we identify any changes in strategic direction, and we highlight to the executives any new challenges that have emerged. Of course, the overall intent of such internal reviews
» Read more
Settling In as a First-Time Boss For some new managers, the idea of giving performance reviews and being responsible for others can be intimidating. For others, there are questions concerning how they manage people older than them, or fears of being accepted by their new team. Though I’ve been managing teams for nearly two decades, I too, had these fears. Bottom
» Read more How to Manage Arrogant Employees There is a reason why employee development is a constant topic among management teams. After all, in addition to being responsible for getting a job done, we as managers are also tasked with the growth and development of our employees. This part of the job, though, is especially hard when we have an arrogant employee who doesn’t
» Read more
What is the Difference Between Management and Leadership? Much has been written about the difference between managers and leaders. It’s an important discussion because they are in fact, not the same thing. Further, a conversation explaining the difference between management and leadership to our employees can greatly benefit an up-and-coming staffer, who is considering future positions in your organization. Let’s take
» Read more
How to Hold Employees Accountable and Get the Results You Need Among the many challenges first-time managers and business leaders face, learning how to hold employees accountable is perhaps the most difficult skill to master. Holding employees accountable is essential because the results managers are expected to deliver depend on the performance and contribution of their individual employees. Thus, managers
» Read more How to Present Information to Your Target Audience We’ve all experienced it. We ask for an update and our employee who sits just three offices down writes you an email that takes them an hour to write, and you 20 minutes to read. Or, we get 4 attachments full of data and numbers that clog our inbox. The concept of audience is taught
» Read more
Managing a Virtual Staff If you are a manager who spends a lot of time on the phone with your employees who sit nine time zones away, you’ve come to the right place. These days, many managers find themselves responsible for employees overseas. Whether these employees report directly to you, or to a local in-country manager, the challenges of working with remote workers are
» Read more
Feedback is a Gift. Be Generous. It’s the end of the another performance cycle and if you’re like me, you are spending a large amount of time evaluating your employees for last year’s work. Did they deliver on their commitments? Have they spent time trying to self-improve? Were they reliable? Did they go above and beyond? If you are new to management, employee performance evaluations
» Read more