The Manager's Resource Handbook
Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
Regardless of whether its your first management gig, or just a new team for you to lead, every manager has a their first meeting with a new team. And while your new employees are likely to be generally cordial and kind, they’re still getting to know you, just as you’re getting to know them. You want to get past this period
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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
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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
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Managing Crisis in the Workplace None of us had any idea that it was the first day of what would become a 10 month, $25 Million investigation. It was late in the afternoon on a cool fall day when the Quality Assurance Manager and the Operations Manager came to my office with a concern over a product defect that had
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How to Be a Boss and a Friend A former mentor of mine once told me that there are two highly uncomfortable relationships that one inevitably encounters in his or her management career. The first of these relationships was the one you have when your former boss ends up working for you. That is, the person from whom you once
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Finding Your Way in Business When The Odds are Against You Nothing is going your way. Cash is drying up. You’re not sure what to do next. No one else seems to have answers, either. All you get are more questions. A business turnaround is one of the most complex and challenging experiences a manager or business leader will ever go through
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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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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
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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,
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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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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 Improve Communication in Your Business It was a game I played as a youngster; we called it ‘telephone.’ It was the game where students sat around in a circle whispering a message into the ear of the person beside them. When the last person got the message, he or she would say the message out loud. Naturally, after 30
» 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
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How to Manage Change in Business Everyday, our industry and market changes. Our staff will change. And leaders of our organizations move on, and new ones take their place. All of this forces us as business leaders to constantly keep tabs on our organization to make sure things run smoothly. Unfortunately, with such dynamics many businesses
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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 Change the Culture of a Team Two years ago, I took the management role for an organization of about 40 people. My predecessor had been asked to leave the business as the team’s performance had gradually been on the decline. My task was to turn the team organization around – no small feat as an outsider to the organization
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Basic Lessons in Customer Service When it comes to working with customers, there are numerous ways to make a lasting impression that will bring them back to you time and time again. Sometimes a friendly tone of voice over the phone is all it takes to win a customer over. Perhaps your quick response time is all the customer needs
» Read more I recently sat through a regional meeting for a large corporation, during which a series of presentations were made. At the conclusion of the meeting, the regional manager got up to share a short set of slides that were presented at the annual corporate summit she had recently attended. The company has been undergoing a series of transformations
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How to Manage in Chaos It was late on a Friday when an employee came by my office to check in before he left for the weekend. The office was mostly empty by this point, and he was one of the last to leave. It had been a busy week and we had hardly crossed paths over the previous five days. This employee was one
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