Congratulations! That great new person has been hired to your team – and they are eager to start adding a ton of value. As a highly-engaged leader, you understand how to create an upward spiral of performance very well: define performance standards, spell out expectations, collaborate on next steps and benchmarks, follow up and adjust….
More and more leaders are getting the message: in order to be effective, you must have regular 1:1 meetings with each of your direct reports. Managers and employees rely on those 1:1 meetings to stay on top of the details of every ongoing project, spot small problems before they turn into bigger ones, and create…
So many leaders get the message: in order to be effective and get results, you must provide ongoing guidance, direction, and support. But the problem is they feel held back from making a change in their management style: “If I do this, how can I get my employees to take me seriously? I’ve been hands-off…
Attracting, recruiting, and retaining the best talent is one of the biggest challenges facing organizations today. For employers of all sizes, in every industry, it is getting harder to get the great candidates they need to come in the door. The people they do manage to hire are less likely to stick around for very…
I’ve said it before: undermanagement can be difficult to identify. And yet, it is the number one cause of the most common preventable problems in the workplace. How is undermanagement going unnoticed? There are two factors at play here: managing people is getting harder, and there are seven key areas of management with which leaders…
Managers who are convinced they don’t have time to manage almost always spend lots of time managing people anyway. That’s because whenever a manager avoids spending time up front making sure things go right, then things almost always go wrong. Small problems pile up and grow until they become so big that they cannot be…
Managers today are under a lot of pressure. The bar keeps being raised. They are responsible for more and more employees. More of the people they manage are working in areas of expertise that the manager doesn’t know much about, or maybe knows almost nothing about. Managing people is getting harder, and it can be…
Many managers tell me, “I’m not a natural leader. I’m a _____.” You fill in the blank: accountant, engineer, doctor. They say, “I don’t really enjoy managing. It involves a lot of difficult conversations.” What these managers are really saying is that they don’t know how to talk to their employees about the work in…