The Manager's Resource Handbook
Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
5 Free Ways to Motivate Your Staff in Challenging Times Motivating employees is not easy. When times are tough, motivating your staff becomes even harder. For the past two years, our business has been undergoing a significant amount of corporate restructuring, downsizing, and changes in management, all of which have understandably left my employees concerned about the future. To make matters worse,
» Read more
The Right Way to Give Performance Feedback to an Employee To my friends, I described it as ‘an out of body experience.’ I made the comment in reference to the annual performance review given to me by my boss a few years back. It was an hour and a half that left me dazed and confused. The reason for my harsh critique was quite
» Read more
7 Steps to Organizational Preservation Though it is far more common than we would like to admit, our businesses and organizations are filled with what I like to call “single persons of failure,” or SPOF. In my company, for example, we have a department manager who is nearing retirement in the next 18 months, yet we have no one identified as his
» Read more
What it Takes to Become a Great Boss and a Great Leader It goes without saying that managing a team and leading people comes with a lot of responsibility. And while many managers are successful and have great careers, there are other managers who simply knock it out of the park. They get results, meet their budget and seemingly don’t break
» Read more
Congratulations! You have a New Employee!…And it Just Happens to Be Your Boss. The idea of it sounds ludicrous. You have a large staff, countless projects and relentless customers to take care of throughout your day. And then you realize you have to add one more load on top of it: managing your own boss. Sad but true, if you
» Read more
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
Writing Employee Performance Reviews Doesn’t Need to Be a Drag Writing performance reviews of your employees can be extremely aggravating. As managers, we are busy. We correct behavior we don’t like when we see it, so taking precious time away from customers and emails can seem like a waste of our time. But performance appraisals are actually one of the
» Read more
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
» 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
Knowing How to Develop Your Staff Developing employees is one of the most important aspects of managing people. After all, the modern worker wants more than a job – they want a career that is fulfilling, and their personal growth is component of that. Moreover, employee growth can be directly linked to things like succession planning and team performance, as well as employee
» 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
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
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
The previous tips in this series discussed the importance of influence (Tip #1) and visibility (Tip #2) as a manager. Both of these may seem pretty obvious, which leads us to Tip #3. On a flight not too long ago, I had a typical business traveler conversation with the passenger sitting next to me. You know, it was that “What do you do?”,
» Read more
The Transition to Management It’s a common experience. You left work on Friday afternoon thinking about your weekend plans. On Friday you were just a team member and part of the “crew.” On Friday, you were given your tasks and were not responsible for what others did. Sure, you were part of a team, but you were pretty much responsible for yourself. Then, on Monday you start
» Read more