A key to your success, as a manager, is developing a good working relationship with your own boss. No matter how effective you might be with your own staff, your image may be tainted if you have a less than desirable rapport with your boss. Becoming more aware of how your boss likes to work requires paying careful attention to…
Have you ever been disappointed by the lack of employee participation in performance discussions? More often than you’d like, have you received minimal input and dialogue, even when asking probing questions? Studies tell us employees are quiet, in part, because they don’t really believe performance discussions are valuable. They describe them as unrelated to their job duties, condescending, meaningless, and…
Difficult people can make your work life miserable. Unless you have mastered a set of strategies to disarm them and gain some control, you may find yourself constantly stressed by the disruption a difficult person can cause. Most trouble makers have learned that their behaviors trigger a predictable set of responses in other people. Those reactions allow them to get…
It goes without saying that not everyone responds well to change. In fact, studies say that in any given group of staff, three to seven percent will be hardcore resisters, while about 60 percent are in the “wait and see” category. The rest just go with the flow. To manage this dynamic, you have to prevent the strong resisters from…
Often short-staffed and under-funded, leaders are driven to focus on operational concerns – getting through each day, meeting short-term objectives and staying afloat. While it may appear this is the only way to survive, the opposite may actually be true. If an organization doesn’t take time to plan for the long term, it may get blindsided by becoming irrelevant or…
Beware: If you are a leader who hesitates to engage in politics at work, your base of influence may be at risk. In these challenging times, your job may even be in danger, as organizations are contemplating more layoffs. Politics is not always nasty business. Think of it as a way of building a network of relationships and an understanding…
Are you a leader who is open about your mistakes, willing to admit your infallibility? Or, are you more apt to pretend mistakes didn’t happen, ignoring or dancing around them? While all leaders fail at times, what distinguishes the successful from the unsuccessful ones is their ability to recover. And, those that effectively recover are often liked more, because the…