The Manager's Resource Handbook
Tools, Resources and Guides for Managers and Business Leaders. Real Advice from Real Bosses.
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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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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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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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
» 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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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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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
» 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 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 How Operating Procedures Can Reduce Competitive Advantage Every business wants financial growth that is stable, predictable and comes with minimal risk. This desire, though, goes against the age-old adage that says the higher one’s risk, the greater the potential reward. Ultimately, every business must strike balance on a sliding scale between the profit reward it seeks and the risk it is will willing
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Overcoming the Frustration of Being Under Staffed How many times have you seen a colleague ask for more resources? After all, their team was very busy and they could really use some more people. You’ve probably witnessed that discussion more times than you can count. Now, how many times have you heard the person they were asking – their own manager,
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Every year, companies establish goals and objectives for their business. Some firms may plan further out – as far as 5 years – in order to obtain a certain sales targets and other corporate metrics. Unfortunately, many businesses stop there and lack a strategy for how they will actually achieve the goals. As a result, the lofty numbers on the
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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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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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What is the Difference Between Management and Leadership? Much has been written about the difference between managers and leaders. It’s an important discussion because they are in fact, not the same thing. Further, a conversation explaining the difference between management and leadership to our employees can greatly benefit an up-and-coming staffer, who is considering future positions in your organization. Let’s take
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How to Create Business Metrics Our world revolves metrics. Businesses track financial investments to see how they grow. Professional and weekend runners alike continually push themselves to shave seconds of the time it takes them to run a mile. And some people monitor their vehicle’s gas mileage to help determine when they need an oil change. Metrics, after all, are used to measure
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