Tools and Templates
Hey There! The below management and business templates are FREE, all we ask is that you give us a little support by FOLLOWING US on LinkedIn or LIKING our Facebook page!
And if you could be so kind … please take a moment to answer the following survey question (takes 10 seconds!). We appreciate your support!
(Results will display after you answer)
I REALLY Need Help With...
- Mentoring my best workers.
- Managing my poor performers.
- Providing career advice to my employees.
- Providing difficult feedback to employees.
- Managing priorities for my team.
- Building or boosting team morale.
Our goal at the Manager’s Resource Handbook is to share our experiences to help other managers build awesome teams and manage great organizations. Below you will find several templates, tools and guides to help you manage people and run your business more effectively. The files posted below can be downloaded by clicking the green arrows. Check back often as we are adding things all the time.
If you have a suggestion for a new template, click HERE to send us an email!
General Business and Strategy
[ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]A Basic SWOT Analysis Framework to Help You Evaluate Your Business
A SWOT Analysis Worksheet to help assess your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of your business or organization. This template offers a basic framework and a series of questions to help you evaluate your organization.
RELATED:
How to Conduct a SWOT Analysis[/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half]
Justifying an Increase in Headcount – A Sample Presentation
Justifying increases to headcount is tough work, and often frustrating for many managers. Here is a sample headcount justification presentation that can help you formulate your argument to get more people and hire additional staff. Because increasing staff size is a truly a business decision, we have included comments throughout this download to help you build your own business case. It’s important to use data and facts to bolster your position, as well as tying the increase in headcount to business needs.
RELATED:
How to Justify Hiring A Specialist
[/ezcol_1half_end]Managing People
[ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]Task Prioritization Worksheet for Managers
Prioritizing tasks and managing a large number of activities can be difficult in a fast-paced environment. This 3-page printable worksheet helps managers list, rank and score the importance of the various activities within his or her department by considering the impact and the timing aspects of each task. Whether you use it on a weekly or monthly basis, or just when you feel overwhelmed, this template will bring order to the chaos.
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
Headcount Planning Template: Determining Your Staffing Needs
Resource planning is a critical activity for any business or organization. Yet we all seem to struggle with it. While there are many ways to plan your resource levels, this download will show you three specific methods for estimating and forecasting your staff size.
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
Methods for Workload Analysis and Evaluation of Headcount
This download provides 8 ways to analyze employee workload and headcount. You can evaluate headcount several ways, based on hours, allocation, tasking throughput, priorities, etc. The most important part of analyzing resources and staff size is simply picking something that works for your needs and sticking to it. There is no right way. Many managers fail to evaluate staff workload and headcount whatsoever, and consequently struggle to manage and project future changes to staff size. By finding a method that works for you and putting it into practice, you’ll already be ahead of the pack.
RELATED:
How to Justify Hiring More People
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]
Murder By Meetings
The MRH team has compiled the best management and business lessons they’ve acquired over their careers and put them all in one place. It’s called Murder by Meetings Strange title? Click HERE to find out where it came from. This download is a sneak peek…[/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]
A Skills Matrix Template to Help Assess Your Team’s Capabilities and Identify Development Needs
This is a downloadable example of a skills matrix, a management tool that helps business leaders better understand their team’s capabilities. In this example, we include comments and alternatives to help you set up a skills matrix that works best for your team.
RELATED:
How to Create a Skills Matrix[/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half]
A Comparison of Depth Vs. Breadth of Various Development Assignments
Effective employee development is the result of careful and well thought out planning by the manager. Employee development can be directly linked to succession planning, team performance, and employee engagement and retention. Choosing the right assignments for employee growth is therefore critical to your management success. A good way to think about an employee’s development needs in terms of depth and breadth. That is, how deep an assignment gets, or how wide it spreads their knowledge base. This template compares ten ways to develop your people in terms of depth and breadth.
RELATED:
29 Fantastic Ways to Mentor and Develop Employees
How to Select Development Assignments for Your Staff
The 70, 20, 10 Rule for Employee Development
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
Organizational Succession Planning Example
This download offers an example of how to outline succession plans for your organization. This sample template helps you identify possible successors to leadership roles in your company who are ready to step up now, or may require some development in order to be ready to take on a leadership position. This succession planning template can also help you identify risks and gaps within your organization in terms of its continuity, when you are unable to identify possible successors to certain management and leadership positions.
RELATED:
What to Do When An Employee Quits
After Someone Was Fired: Moving On
Managing a Layoff – A 4 Part Series
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
How to Use Employee Goals to Drive Alignment and Accountability
A simple management tool to align goals from the corporate level down to your individual team. Establishing a clear strategy to meet goals and measures will help you more effectively manage your organization. See our short article to help you better drive accountability and alignment using this tool.
RELATED:
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
SMART Goals for Employees: A Template for Crafting Goals for Managers and Staff
Driving performance starts with setting meaningful goals and expectations. This MRH worksheet serves as a template for writing SMART goals for you and your employees. This simple framework and series of easy questions will help managers and employees develop goals that are specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and timed.
RELATED:
How to Manage Top Performing Employees
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
A Tiered Approach to Creating Employee Development Plans
This template serves as a resource for managers who are trying to create effective development plans for employees. Employee development is one of the most important responsibilities of managers, but when managing a diverse group in terms of experience and skills, recognizing differences in growth needs and creating these opportunities can be difficult. Using a tiered framework helps managers effectively target specific individuals and their needs.
RELATED:
29 Fantastic Ways to Mentor and Develop Employees
How to Select Development Assignments for Your Staff
The 70, 20, 10 Rule for Employee Development
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
Guideline for Managers: Questions for Coaching Your Employees
This 8-page guideline offers tips on how to coach an employee – be it a high performer, an employee with a development need, or an employee for which you have performance concern. This download includes a number of questions that managers can use that will help the employee reconstruct the observed behavior in their own minds as well as lead them to create an action plan to make changes. This guideline should be used in conjunction with our Coaching Worksheet Template for Managers, which serves as a template for preparing coaching discussions.
RELATED:
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
Coaching Conversation Template: Planning a Mentoring Session
This worksheet serves as a template for managers to prepare for coaching and mentoring conversations with employees. In order to properly coach an employee, managers should prepare specific questions that will be asked of the employee in order to help them drive change in his or her performance. This worksheet should be used in conjunction with the Questions for Coaching Guideline, which offers some initial questions that can be used to prepare for the discussion.
RELATED:
Shaping Young Minds: The Art of Mentoring
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
Sample-Letter-of-Recommendtion-for-Promoting-an-Employee.pdf
Version: 2
Sample Letter of Promotion for an Employee
The best way to start the process of promoting an employee is to write a formal letter of recommendation capturing key accomplishments and performance history. This download is a sample write up for promoting an employee, similar to the letter you would send to your Human Resources department. For more on how to promote your employees, read our article on Justifying Promotions.
RELATED:
Knowing When to Promote an Employee
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
Employee Promotion Checklist for Managers
The decision and means evaluating employees for a promotion is not always clear and can be subjective. To help give your assessment more structure, we have created a checklist of key questions you should ask yourself when deciding whether or not to promote an employee. Of the 21 questions on this list, we recommend that 15 of them be answered with a ‘YES.’ For more information on how to promote your employees, check out our article on Justifying Promotions. [/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]
One on One Coaching Template for Employee Meetings
This PDF template helps you get more out of your one on one meetings with employees. It gives you a simple format that will help you prepare, guide, and evaluate your coaching sessions in an organized manner. It also includes space for you to record notes and action items to make it easy to follow-up and pick up where you left on in the next one on one meeting. Print out a copy for each employee coaching session as a way of getting away from the computer and focusing 100% on the employee.[/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half]
White Paper: Is Organizational Friction Killing Your Firm’s Productivity?
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 in unison like instruments in an orchestra. Depending on the way a business is run, the interaction between such diverse teams and people can result in organizational friction.
This white paper provides real examples of organizational friction that were found in large corporations. This paper will help you identify and understand the effects of this sort of friction within your business.[/ezcol_1half_end]
Technology Management
[ezcol_1half]How to Create a Technical Compliance Matrix
When developing a new product or working to a technical specification, it’s essential you satisfy every requirement the customer gives you. But how can you be certain you’ve addressed everything? How do you prove it? A compliance matrix is a simple, yet highly effective tool to ensure you don’t miss any details. It can also help technology managers identify risks and issues that need attention. This downloadable tutorial will walk you through the process of creating a compliance matrix for your customer’s product specification, step-by-step.
RELATED:
Successful Product Development: 9 Tips for Negotiating Customer Requirements
What is a Compliance Matrix and How Can I Create One?[/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half]
Creating a Technology Growth Funnel
To better organize your technology projects, use this template to generate a growth funnel. A technology growth funnel enables you to visually communicate the state of various product development initiatives throughout the development cycle. A growth funnel also gives you the opportunity to see a progression of adjacent technologies in your product pipeline.
RELATED:
How To Organize Technology Growth for Your Business. [/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half]
Sample Format of a Multigenerational Technology Plan (#1)
An example of a multigenerational technology plan and product growth strategy (template 1). Multigenerational technology planning helps produce sustainable product growth.
RELATED:
Is Your R&D Under House Arrest?
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
Sample Format of a Multigenerational Technology Plan (#2)
A second example of a multigenerational technology plan and product growth strategy (template 2). Multigenerational technology planning helps produce sustainable product growth.
RELATED:
How to Justify Hiring a Specialist
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
Sample Format of a Multigenerational Technology Plan (#3)
A third example of a multigenerational technology plan and product growth strategy (template 3). Multigenerational technology planning helps produce sustainable product growth. [/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half]
White-Paper-Multigenerational-Technology-Planning_2.pdf
Version: 2
White Paper: How Multigenerational Technology Planning Can Grow Your Business
Technology planning is the forward-looking, strategic exercise of evaluating current product offerings, the competition, and market trends. It seeks to provide the very complex answer to the very simple question: “Where should I invest today in order to create profitable products tomorrow?”
Multigenerational technology planning takes this basic concept further and implements a series of iterations over time, bridging the gaps between the desired technology and the present day standard. This white paper describes how one can create a multigenerational strategy that will results in sustainable technology growth for your business. [/ezcol_1half_end]
Project and Program Management
[ezcol_1half]How to Create a Project Change Log
Tracking and centralizing change requests from your customer is the first step in managing scope creep and preventing cost overruns. This short tutorial provides an overview of what a project change log is, and walks you through the steps to create a change register for your project. This template also includes bonus tips for how to managing changes with your customer.
RELATED:
Managing Project Changes and Scope Creep
16 Tips for New Project Managers[/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half]
How to Create a Project Compliance Matrix
You’re about to wrap a bow on the project and call it done when you have that sinking feeling: “Did I do everything that was asked of me?” How do you know you’ve fulfilled everything the customer defined in their Statement of Work? A compliance matrix is a simple, yet highly effective tool to ensure you don’t miss any details. It can also help project managers identify risks and issues that need attention. This downloadable tutorial will walk you through the process of creating a compliance matrix for your project, step-by-step.
RELATED:
What is a Compliance Matrix and How Can I Create One?
9 Strategies for Negotiating Customer Requirements[/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]
How to Create a Project Estimate
This template is intended to provide an example breakdown of hours and effort associated with a given project. The comments listed in the boxes to the right highlight the various benefits associated with this particular template. The more detail you put into the estimate, the better your estimate will be.
RELATED:
16 Tips for New Project Managers
A Basic Approach to Scoping and Estimating New Projects[/ezcol_1half_end]
Replying to an RFP? Save Time With Our ProGuide and Word Template!
Developing an RFP and RFQ Response Kit
This Ready-to-Write RFP Response template (Microsoft Word Doc format) will give you a head start in writing your RFP response. You can follow the template we’ve setup for you, or modify it entirely to be your own. You will ALSO get our 35-page MRH ProGuide containing everything you need to know to develop a solid response to your customers’ RFPs and RFQs. This ProGuide is packed with tips on everything from formatting your document, to setting a capture strategy, to evaluating your competition. It also includes a printable checklist to help you review your RFP Response before submitting it to your client.
[ezcol_1half] Here’s What You Get:Length: 9 Page Word Template; 35 Page ProGuide
[/ezcol_1half_end]
Format: .zip Download; (includes .doc Word Template, PDF ProGuide)
File Size: 588Kb
Price: $34.99
Download Link Made Available After Checkout
Buy Now
[/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end] Get the RFP Response ProGuide Table of Contents:
[ezcol_1half]
Sample Executive Summary Slides
Every report, document or presentation has a purpose. Maybe it’s to state the results of your financial analysis, or maybe it’s intended to convince someone else to take a certain action. The key to making a good executive summary is to make sure it mirrors this intent. By understanding the intent of the executive summary, it will help you select the most appropriate information to share. This download includes samples of executive summary slides.
RELATED:
The Art of the Executive Summary
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half]
White Paper: Demystify Project Estimating with These Three Steps
How many times have you heard “It’s going to take you how long?” when you present an estimate of time and effort for a given project? Preparing an estimate for a new business proposal can be complex and risky if not done correctly. Your customers will always seek faster and cheaper. At the same time, your estimate needs to be accurate enough to ensure your business can make money. Taking a highly conservative and risk adverse approach, you may simply price yourself out of the deal.
Ultimately the goal of any proposal is to win the business, and ensure that it is profitable. The key to bringing the extremes together is to use data to formulate an estimate that is comprehensive and thorough. This white paper outlines a simple three step strategy that will help project managers improve their estimating skills.
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]
Risk Assessment Matrix Example
A Risk Assessment Matrix is a tool that enables project teams plan for problems, manage risk, prioritize action, and communicate to others. This template provides step-by-step instructions that teach you how to create your own risk evaluation, and also shows you how to quantify the value of the risk. This method helps you deconstruct risks into a single cost value, which can be factored into your business case and financial evaluations.
RELATED:
How to Create a Project Risk Evaluation Matrix
[/ezcol_1half_end]Interviewing and Hiring
[ezcol_1half]Phone Screening Question Template
Interviewing applicants for a job posting starts with a phone screen. This questionnaire and phone screen template serves as a good tool to help ensure you’ve asked the right questions of your candidate and will help you evaluate the candidate’s motives, interests and qualifications for your job posting. In addition, by using the same questionnaire when screening multiple candidates, you can compare responses to help you decide who to bring in for an on-site interview.[/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half]
105 Great Interview Questions
Interviewing candidates for your team is tough. How do you know what questions to ask? How do you maximize your time to get the best assessment possible? This download contains a list of 105 sample interview questions to ask your applicants, all the way from the initial phone screen, to the in-person interview. The list covers a lot of different types of employees and can be adapted to almost any manager’s needs. It also contains a list of question you should avoid asking job candidates.
RELATED:
8 of My Favorite Interview Questions
7 Things To Look For When Interviewing Candidates
[/ezcol_1half_end][ezcol_1half][/ezcol_1half] [ezcol_1half_end]
New Employee Request Form
This staffing request template provides the specific details you need when justifying the need for a new employee. This form will identify the type of employee(s) you are looking to hire, basic educational and experience levels, as well as some details pertaining to cost impact of adding an employee. Also included on this form are areas that can be used for justifying adding an employee, as well as places to collect signature approvals.[/ezcol_1half_end]
[ezcol_1half]
Sample Business Cases to Justify Hiring Additional Staff
These slides provide a comparison of different types of employees and the various pros and cons of each type. Also included are sample calculations to help you estimate the approximate cost of adding the employee(s) to your team. By calculating the approximate cost and selecting the right type of hire to fill your need, you will greatly boost your business case for increasing staff.
RELATED:
Strategy for Justifying More Staff
[/ezcol_1half_end]