The Manager's Resource Handbook
Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Managing and Mentoring The Leaders that Work For You We recently posted an article about the art of mentoring, which primarily centered on coaching junior staff who are just beginning their careers. We wanted to go further into the topic of mentoring, but focus on a different group. As your career advances, your organization gets larger. Eventually, you get to
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8 Tips For Becoming a Great Mentor To Your Staff Last week I met with a new staffer on my team, who joined the firm just a couple of months ago. He was eager and prepared, bringing a number of questions to the meeting; it was a very productive conversation overall. While we did talk about his specific tasks, much of
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Helping Employees Make Career Choices As managers, our job is to get results, plan resources, and develop our employees. In terms of effective employee development, the time we take to coach our staff members is critical to helping each one become a growing force within the organization. Further, sometimes, we need to mentor them on more than just the day-to-day skills
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Working Hard or Hardly Working? It’s a question we all ask ourselves. Telecommuting is no longer a “new” thing. For many companies, large and small, more and more employees work from home, either occasionally, or on a regular basis. All you need is an internet connection. But supervising these remote employees presents challenges to you as a manager because, well,
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5 Things You Need to Do to Create Your Own Skills Matrix Imagine: a critical assignment comes in, and you need to figure out who to give it to in order to get it done. You only have one shot to get it right in order to secure that new contract. Who do you give it to? Who is the most capable?
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29 Fantastic Ways to Mentor and Develop Your Employees If there is one thing that sets apart the great managers from the rest of the crowd, it would be their ability to continuously develop employees and to grow the capability of their teams. Unlike managers who simply focus on results, the leaders who place deliberate emphasis on employee development build morale and
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Writing SMART Goals for Employees (With Examples) A colleague once told me “I have a really important goal in life…I want to climb Mt. Everest, someday.” While he was absolutely serious in his demeanor and spoke at length about why he wanted to do it, the short conversation revealed he had never done any climbing before. Further, he had hardly done research into
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If there is one thing that every manager has in common, it’s that we’ve all dealt with employee performance issues. Every one of us has a Susan, who always does everything right and never makes a mistake. And then, we all have a Michael, who struggles to get it together. Michael’s performance problems never seem to go away and managing
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