The Manager's Resource Handbook
Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
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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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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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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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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When Your Customer Makes You Cringe: Dealing With Unprofessional Clients During a recent meeting with a client, my patience grew to its thinnest level yet in our working relationship. They were unhappy with schedule, but they were the cause for the delays. They were dissatisfied with our solution to their problem, but it was driven by their written guidelines. They
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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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I’m Glad I Got an MBA, But it Couldn’t Have Taught Me This For years I wanted to go back to school to pursue my MBA. It seemed like the next logical step in my career, but I put it off for one thing or another. Travel. Family. Cost. Time. Eventually, though, I did get my MBA and I’m very grateful for it.
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Your First Staff Meeting: Topics to Cover and What to Discuss Nice work! You got the job, and now it’s time to hold your first staff meeting as the team’s new manager. You should be excited and proud of your accomplishment. And, it is ok to be nervous. Every new leader struggles at the beginning; it takes time to get the
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How To Create Your Management New Year’s Resolutions Welcome to a New Year! The beginning of a new year offers the closest thing we ever get to a fresh start as a manager, allowing us to recalibrate expectations of ourselves and our employees. It also marks a great time for business leaders to set the next 12 months off on the
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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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15 Minutes That Fuel Productivity Meetings are perhaps the most effective form of communication in any workplace. They give everyone a chance to communicate in real-time, they prevent important messages from getting lost in an inbox, and they offer managers a chance to get some valuable face time with their employees. But not every meeting is intended to be a lengthy conversation or
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How to Negotiate and Manage Customer Requirements Seven years ago, my company was on the losing end of a $4 Million settlement. I could write a lengthy explanation as to how things got there, but it came down to one very simple thing: we gave our customer what we thought they wanted, not what they said they wanted. It was
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When to Outsource? 8 Questions To Ask Yourself if You Are Thinking About Outsourcing To many business leaders, outsourcing may seem like a great solution to just about any problem. Indeed, leveraging outside resources and expertise can certainly enable you to fix issues and to keep your business thriving. However, outsourcing and offshoring typically require a lot of up-front planning, coordination and analysis on your part to
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A Formula for Giving Performance Feedback to Our Most Talented Workers When I first became a manager of other people, I was deathly afraid of having to deal with performance issues and difficult employees. And while it took a little time to figure out how to manage those individuals, it was not until I sat down with my best employee for the
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Learning from the Mistakes We Make as a Managers of People Giving feedback to our employees is just one of the many responsibilities of being a manager. It is part of the job, as is receiving constructive criticism from our own boss. Whether you are an entry-level employee, or the CEO of a Fortune 200 company, feedback is a gift. No matter
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Before the RFP: Key Messages That Position You for Success Winning a contract comes down to finding mutual value between you and the client. The concept of value goes beyond the financial numbers, though, and is really a combination of price, product, services and trust. When you receive a Request for Proposal (RFP) from a client, how do you demonstrate the value you can
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What Does It Mean to Be a Leader? Great leaders are special people. I was only a couple of years into my career when I began to notice the term leadership used around the office. Being in my early twenties, I did not think much of it back then and was just glad to have a job in a down economy. In
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