Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
How to Deal with Negative Employees in the Workplace His name was Mark. I was 34. Mark, my employee, was 54. It was not my first management rodeo, but I’m pretty sure he likened me more to one of his three teenagers at home than he saw me as his boss. Dealing with negative employees in the workplace is fairly common for managers, but Mark
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Interviewing Candidates for Customer Service Positions Many organizations make hiring decisions in very practical terms: Are they willing to relocate? Do they have the required education? Do they possess the minimum number of years of experience per the job requirements? These are all valid questions to ask yourself and are certainly variables to consider when making routine hiring decisions. When
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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:
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Here is What You Need To Do When the Sky Is Falling If you have not yet experienced it in your career, you will at some point. Managing a crisis at work is difficult for even the most skilled of leaders. Every time I think of such situations, I imagine that scene in the movie Apollo 13, when NASA controllers place
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Management Challenges and Solutions For Today’s Organization Over the past few weeks, I’ve been participating in a significant hiring binge by my firm. Having interviewed candidate after candidate, the process of filling more than 20 new positions is extremely fast-paced, if not frantic, considering how important hiring decisions are. How do I properly assess a candidate’s skills when I am meeting
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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
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How to Build a Department Budget If you’ve ever had to build a budget for work, you know the stress, headache and aggravation it often entails. If you have not, well, consider yourself lucky. Either way, every leader knows that fiscal management is important and that our stakeholders depend on us to manage within a budget – our team, our shareholders, and in some
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Learning How a Simple Game Makes for Better Business Have you ever played that children’s game of sliding tiles contained within a frame? Most of you probably have. But for those who have not, the objective of the game is to place the pieces in a specific order, perhaps arranged by color or number. What most people don’t know is
» Read more Competitor or Partner? It’s Not Always David Vs. Goliath Note to Reader: Competitor names are changes for privacy reasons. Last month, I was asked by a client to participate in a visit to some of their customers. The client, Acme Electric, wanted to meet with some of their smaller customers with the hopes of growing their existing sales volume
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The Benefits of Outsourcing Must Outweigh The Drawbacks Whenever we hear someone mention the term outsourcing, we usually have an immediate reaction to that single word. First, we might say that outsourcing work is a modern and effective management technique that has many applications and offers countless benefits. Or, we may say that outsourcing work – either overseas or just to an outside
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Managing Your Team After Someone Was Fired Think about the last time someone was let go in the office. It may have been your peer, maybe a superior, or maybe you had to terminate the employee. Aside from obvious misconduct like starting a fight in the office, berating a coworker or some other form of glaringly punishable offense in the workplace,
» Read more Setting Goals in a Matrix Organization Must Centralize Purpose Ever feel like you’re on an island in the office? You know, everyone seems to be battling for their own needs and there’s a constant demand for your help, but rarely an offer of assistance in return? If so, it is a classic example of what happens when a business gets sloppy
» Read more What Is Structured Problem Solving and Why Use It? I was asked to attend a meeting by the manufacturing manager. “We have a problem” he said. He had been alerted to a defect with hardware being processed through the production floor. Initial information suggested that during some of the molding processes, some parts were noted to have cracked while the molten
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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
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How to Embrace the Diversity of Your Workplace I often overhear business travelers at the airport talking on the phone, characterizing their imminent journey as “I’m headed to Asia” or “I’ll be in the Middle East next week.” I know I’ve done it as well because let’s face it, it’s just easier to mention a region rather than say something
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5 Easy Tips for Making a Killer Presentation Whether during an average day at the office, via web meeting, or while attending a major conference, we have all sat through someone else’s presentation. Some presentations were mind-blowing and memorable, others were mediocre; and I’m willing to bet there are still others that you’ve witnessed that were downright awful, and you walked away confused at the
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Understanding the Business Benefits of Airline Alliances We often hear about partnerships in business, but what does this actually mean? How do they work? Regardless of the form they may take, be it a licensing deal, a revenue sharing arrangement, or a full blow Joint Venture, partnerships are designed to maximize the expertise and strengths of each partner and can make good business
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Today’s business environment is competitive, fast paced and full of organizational congestion. We have specialists, technicians, analysts, controllers, planners, schedulers and researchers. There are functional teams in finance, programs, sales, engineering, manufacturing, quality assurance and human resources. The management challenge in this climate, though, is how to get all these groups – all these people – to work
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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
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Why Consider a Horizontal Integration Strategy? Just about every firm continuously tweaks and looks for new ways to optimize their operation in the pursuit of growth and profits. In the early 2000s, made even more possible by a rapidly expanding internet, just about every industry seemed to jump on the outsourcing bandwagon. The thought was simple: why expend internal resources on
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