Running the Morning Dash
Productivity guru Gina Trapani says "Do the Most Important Thing First". She calls this “running a morning dash.” When she sits down to work in the morning, before she checks any email, she spends an hour on the most important thing on her to-do list.
Keeping Your Team on Track
The Dale Carnegie blog offers practical advice on ways to build and maintain effective communication with your team/staff. These tips can put your team on the right track and help you stay there.
Production before People or People before Production
When asked about the most important factor in manufacturing, many employees put people ahead of production. It is important that our priorities are right on this one. Breaches in cleanroom protocol must not be allowed to result in an unsafe product. At the same time, skilled, educated cleanroom employees are essential for production of quality product.
Five Ideas to Increase Your Productivity at Work
Finding it hard to carve out time to get important things done? Checking email, people at your office door, unexpected meetings can all fill time but may not be getting you any closer to getting your own work done or to move ahead on projects.
Saying No to the Boss
If you’re the boss, you don’t necessarily want to hear the word “no.” If you have an issue or concern with a boss’s ideas, it’s not easy or may not be welcome to disagree. So is saying “no” taboo in the workplace? Not if you want innovation, productivity, and success.
Getting it Right the Second Time
Repeating yourself and doing it using different methods of communication can enhance persuasion and buy-in.
Finding Success as a New Manager
Shari Lifland, Editorial Communications Manager for the American Management Association (AMA), says that, “According to a new survey by CareerBuilder, more than one-quarter (26%) of managers said they weren’t ready to become a leader when they started managing others. Even more disturbing, 58% said they didn’t receive any management training.”
Are You a Manager or a Leader?
All leaders are managers but not all managers are leaders. Both managers and true leaders get things done through others, but managers do so by virtue of their specific position within their organizations, while true leaders— regardless of their official rank—do so by inspiring others.
A Bestiary of Difficult Employees
Bestiaries, books that listed and described certain animals and their characteristics, were popular in the Middle Ages. Stories about each “beast” were designed to teach important moral lessons.
The Myth of Work and Life Balance
A recent survey of North American employees found that 87 percent of respondents say their work/life balance is negatively affecting their health. If you’ve been killing yourself trying to achieve daily work/life balance, it may be a pipe dream.
Three Ways to Say No Without Saying No
We’ve all been there. A team member comes up to you with a “great idea.” Sometimes the idea is good, but maybe not great. Sometimes the idea has little merit. In his blog, “Radical Management,” Steve Denning offers advice on how to respond in these situations without deflating the energies and passion of your team.
Strategies to Build Loyalty: Tips on How to Re-engage Workers
All you have to do is look around your organization to see the impact this economic storm has had on the workplace. Now it’s time to focus on the process of rebuilding loyalty and employee engagement.
Quick Follow-ups Move Projects Forward
Do you find projects running behind on a regular basis, or employees unmotivated to get tasks done? You may want to tweak your management style to include this quick follow-up technique.
Twelve Common Workplace Behaviors That Drain Energy and How to Purge Them
The source of your exhaustion might not be the tasks you’re doing or the hours you’re working—it may be the actions of the people laboring beside you. Jon Gordon identifies twelve draining behaviors to watch out for—and explains what you can do to counteract them and create a more nourishing workplace.
Best Practices with Interns
Working with an intern is both a privilege and a responsibility for an employer. Interns can be a boon to your business and give you the extra pair of hands, current educational thinking, and enthusiasm and support your business needs.
Qualities of an Effective Manager
Here is a list of the five must have qualities of an effective manager according to a blog by Roberta Matuson, President of Human Resource Solutions. She states that this list was put together as a result of working for some pretty ineffective managers.
Sorry, I Just Don’t Have Time
If you as a manager or team member are asked for help, do not simply reply, “Sorry, I don’t have time.” That says that you consider your tasks to be more important than theirs. Everyone has the same number of hours in the day. Prioritizing and giving help when needed is important.
Why You Need Equanimity
It seems that almost everyone is caught up in some sort of crisis or conflict, be it at work or at home. It might be stress around processes, deadlines, budgets and job security, or personal relationships and unresolved conflicts. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Miscommunication Patterns at Work
In the process of communicating with others at work, we often miscommunicate much more than we communicate. There are of course as many ways to miscommunicate as there are types of people but here are the Top 2 miscommunication patterns to watch out for and avoid…
10 Mistakes Every Leader Should Make
The thing that sets good managers apart is that they always learn from their mistakes. Here are the 10 Mistakes Every Leader Should Make (and learn from) Before They Die.
Don't Make Me Lead! I Don't Want To!
What's been lost in the voluminous amount of material on creating great leaders is that some people aren't cut out for a leadership role. I think that anyone can be successful if they really want to lead, but some people honestly don't want to take on the role.
The High Cost of Workplace Conflict
Conflict has become so much a part of western culture that when it is absent, many look for it in their entertainment and others simply generate it to fill a void.
Don’t Let Your Next Crisis Go to Waste
This idea from Ron Ashkenas, managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and author of several books on organization management, takes the experience of a crisis and puts it to work in less trying situations.
Is the Peter Principle a Myth?
The Peter Principle holds that “in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence” and it is still quoted and blamed in many management situations today. Is it true? And if so, why does it persist?
Leadership Realities You Won't Learn in Management School
In their book, Management? It's Not What You Think!, authors Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and, Joseph Lampel offer “leadership realities” that are often overlooked or undervalued in organizations.