Posts by Liz Richards
Your Team Can’t Manage Itself
One of the most insidious pieces of advice in modern management is to “stay out of your employees’ way” and “let them do their best work”. The intention is to display trust in the people working for you and, perhaps more importantly, avoid the dreaded label of micromanager. Here’s the problem with that. …
The Seven Types of Management Challenges and How to Solve Them
Despite how unique your management challenges may seem, the common denominator is likely unstructured, low-substance, hit-or-miss communication. When things are going wrong in a management relationship, that is usually at least part of the cause. What do the best managers do differently? They build and maintain an ongoing schedule of high-quality one-on-one dialogues with every…
Four ways even good managers waste time
If you’re a manager who feels you are spending so much of your time managing, yet inevitably end up firefighting, something like this may sound familiar: Listen, I spend tons of time communicating with my direct reports. Not to mention my boss, their boss, and counterparts in other workgroups and other departments. Look at Project…
Stop Recruiting Gen Z Like Millennials
Employers eager to attract the best young employees are too often delivering the wrong messages to the wrong people at the wrong times. Because young talent is perpetually in greater demand than supply, employers desperate to fill open positions make the mistake of turning recruiting into an elaborate sales pitch. The problem is that prospective…
Post-pandemic work: What each generation needs for success
If ever there was a generation-defining ‘accident of history’, the Covid-19 pandemic is it. Compared to other recent accidents of history—the 2008 recession, 9/11, ongoing war—Covid-19 has directly impacted far more people, of all ages, on a global scale. Quite literally, everyone is going through this together. We are currently experiencing a classic example of…
The Top Causes of Employee Turnover
After huge recent fluctuations in the job market—and despite ongoing downsizing, restructuring, and reengineering—unemployment is at record lows and employers are facing more severe talent shortages than any time since we at RainmakerThinking began our workplace research in 1993. Not only must organizations fill the gaps with new hires, they must also ensure their best…
What Gen Z Signals for Generational Change in the Workplace
Most people think of generational change in the workplace as a diversity issue. Some experts will give employers a checklist or cheat sheet for each generation, outlining how to attract, hire, retain, and manage people based on birthdate. That’s misguided. Imagine being told to manage people this way based on any other measure of…
No, Your Superstars Don’t Want to Manage Themselves
How much of my management time should I spend on each member of my team? It’s a question many managers have asked themselves at some point. Should they spend more time with the low performers? The average performers? Should they split their time equally among everyone, regardless of performance? (The short answer to that last…
How to fight overcommitment and be a master collaborator
The world of work has been becoming more complex and uncertain since we began studying it in 1993. But now, of course, that complexity and uncertainty has been magnified by new and unexpected challenges. A lot of the problems to be solved are new. But a lot more of them have been faced and managed…
There Are Seven Myths Holding Managers Back
Managers today are under more pressure than ever. The pressures of managing a hybrid workforce, navigating increasingly enmeshed cross-functional collaborative relationships, and retaining as many people as possible are really adding up. Plus, managers still have to find time to get their own work done. Yet, the biggest thing getting in the way of most…