The Manager's Resource Handbook
Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
A Manager’s Best Practices for Leading Remote Employees: Out of Sight, But Not Out of Mind We used to joke, Andy and I, about how the only time he ever saw his team was when he traveled half way around the world to meet with a customer in Japan. “I have to fly to the other side of the globe
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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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Can we be honest? No one really enjoys writing employee performance reviews. Not many managers take pleasure in tracking employee goals. And yet, everyone likes to see their organization and company flourish. For small businesses, the idea of introducing a framework for managing performance may seem like a waste of precious energy and time. I can see why that is the case.
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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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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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16 Mistakes We Make When Interviewing a Job Candidate Ever feel like you are just asking random questions to a job candidate during an interview? Do you watch the clock just trying to fill the minutes with conversation? Interviewing job applicants to fill an open position on your team is no easy task, and conducting a meaningful interview is a skill
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How to Retain Good Employees There are two things that unite every manager and business leader, in every industry, and in every country. First, they want the best talent working in their organization. And second, they want their talented workers to stay. But this is no longer the working environment of the past generations when people remained with the same
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What to Consider When Downsizing Your Team It might be the most delicate and sensitive topic that you as a manager will face in your career: selecting the names of those people to let go or make redundant. The context here is reducing the size of the organization to maintain profitability, or improve efficiency, not firing someone due to misconduct. From
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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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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,
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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
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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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A Manager’s Guide to Promoting Staff and Knowing When It’s Time Promoting your employees entails a lot more than just giving them more pay. Promotions are about developing your staff, rewarding performance, building a succession plan for your business, and managing the overall advancement of your workforce. Further, these days, employees seek advancement – whether inside or outside your company – so
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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
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