Business Management Information
Why Training Fails
Sometimes when I conduct my workshop on Effective Meetings, one of the
participants will ask, "Where's my boss?"
Another Use for Meetings
Every meeting is a laboratory where you can observe and learn important things
about the people who attend. In fact, you can use meetings to identify people who
merit being promoted into leadership positions. Watch for:
Employee Turnover: Is It Eating Up Your Profits?
Keeping the cost of doing business down, yet providing a quality product or service, is one of the most critical components of success for today?s leader. What many fail to realize is that employee turnover can represent a very substantial price tag to a company's productivity and its bottom line.
Quality Hiring: Are You Doing It Right?
Quality hiring is more than running ads, screening, interviewing and checking references. It is a series of specific procedures that can bring in top candidates or create bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Here are six ways to enhance the entire recruitment process.
Employee Surveys: a Strategic Tool for Positive Change
Do you want to measure your workers? level of satisfaction? Or change policies and procedures to make them more effective? Or find out if your supervisors are stuck in out-dated ways of managing? Good Idea! But how do you make sure you are getting reliable information to make sound management decisions?
Employee Motivation: It?s More Than A Paycheck
Managers often ask, usually with exasperation, ?How can I keep my employees motivated? I pay them decently. What else is there??
Effective Meetings - Quick Survey
Here?s an easy quiz to check the health of your meetings.
Why Would Anyone Hold a Bad Meeting?
Pssst, want a stock tip that will make you rich? Okay, here it is: phone a public
corporation and ask to speak with the CEO.
How to Hold Effective Staff Meetings
Many people believe that they conduct effective meetings, when all they really do is
host a party. Or worse, they deliver a monologue. In either case, their meetings
produce little.
Quick Tip - Effective Meetings Have a Complete Agenda
Most agendas for a meeting look like this.
Jewelry Use by Employees
Many companies have dress codes, which include jewelry. Some companies do this because they do not wish to offend customers who are of various faiths by employees who wear necklaces with religious symbols. Others out of practicality as some jewelry can get caught in machinery and cause severe injury or even death. You may wish to have a jewelry policy to prevent loss of your customer base and/or prevent employees from dying, which could inadvertently drive up your commercial insurance costs.
Employee Orientation: The 90 Day Difference
Why do some new managers succeed while others fail? It all depends on the first three months ? the critical time when the new hire is learning the ropes. The new manager?s boss plays a vital role in the orientation process. Here are four strategies to quickly get the new hire up to speed and working productively
You?re Hired, Now Go Home: Managing Workers at a Distance
Telecommuting or virtual work opens up a wider net of potential employees for businesses ? the disabled, the stay-at-home parent, the student, the retired, the flextime person, etc. However, it also creates unique challenges in hiring, supporting and managing this new group of workers. Here are six tips on managing workers at a distance.
Management Training: Are You Satisfied With The Results?
If you?re not satfied with the results of your management training programs, maybe it?s because you handle training as a ?one shot? event rather than a process of developing your people to be better managers.
Empowering Others - Giving Them Some Control
It's been a pretty good weekend around the place - not done a lot, but I have done what I've wanted to do - and that makes the difference.
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Problem Solving - Think Cleopatras Ass
Picture the scene. Anthony pops down to the guardhouse, partly because he wants a break with the lads, but also because he has a problem. Cleopatra says she wants to bathe in ass's milk. So Anthony tells the guys in the guardhouse, that he needs
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An Honest Look at Your Business
There is a difference between being comfortable and being in apathy.
Quick Tip - Effective Meetings Earn a Profit
Most people treat meetings as a free resource that can be used to deal with any
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Management to the Vision-Contribution and the Role of Compliance
As a manager our role is to:
Ten Steps to Take the Work out of Work ? Replicate Yourself!
They say that management can be a lonely place. A manager has to lead from the front, make challenging demands of their people and if part of an organisation, pass on the dictats of the more senior and remote bosses up at the top.
How to Deal With Salespeople
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Ten Relationship Traits And Skills For Good Leadership
An important aspect of good leadership is the ability to work and relate with others. When creating and building your unique leadership style consistently developing relational skills is a priority. There are ten qualities that characterize successful leadership in the area of relating and communicating with other people.
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Micromanagement and Delegation
Micro-Management and Delegation
Recently I had a long discussion with a friend of mine about Managers and managing. She is a former HR Manager for several major companies and was bemoaning the fact that training for managers has been cut back so significantly in recent years and that managers no longer receive the type of help, guidance and assistance that they received just a few short years ago. My background has been in retail and telecom. Hers was neither. Yet the same problems and issues seem to rise in every industry. Of course, this is exactly the reason that I got into coaching. Coaching allows those managers who want to improve a very personalized venue to do just that.
We went on to agree that the common pattern these days seemed to be for the department star performer to be promoted from contributor, to team leader, to manager in seemingly record time. We agreed that new managers have difficulty moving from the contributor to the manager role because no one is willing to spend the time and energy to coach them through the various hurdles that new managers and leaders face. We agreed that this lack of training never seemed to lower the expectations of the manager, just the performance.
Then we disagreed, strongly. What caused the disagreement? The
concept was micro-management. My friend explained to me that she has "coached" many employees recently and that many of them complained about one particular manager who was micro-managing them. She told me that she helps the employees understand and come to grips with "their problem". "You're not going to be able to change that manager, she explained to me, "so you've got to change the employees". She explains to them that if they are being micro-managed, there's probably a reason for it. They are probably doing something wrong. If they just identify that problem and improve, their manager will stop the micro-management. "The employees need to improve themselves. It's as simple as that."
I wish my life was as simple as that.
She acknowledges that with that many employees complaining that
it's likely the manager is the problem. But changing the manager is too much trouble, she says, so let's tell the employees it's their fault.
While it is true that it is sometimes necessary to micro-manage
people, her explanation makes little sense to me. You might micro-manage an employee if their performance is lacking. Or because the project they are working on is very high visibility and any chance of error must be minimized. But when a number of employees are complaining about the same manager micro-managing them it implies one of two things.
Either this manager:
1. Has a lot of problem employees and needs to start weeding them out, or
2. This manager does not know how to let go and properly
delegate to their staff.
Excessive micro-management is not the sign of a healthy manager.
When someone is constantly micro-managing their staff it's generally their problem, not the employees.
If you are micro-managing your staff, refusing to delegate routine, and not so routine tasks to them for completion, then you are setting yourself up for trouble. Have you ever heard yourself say, "I would delegate this to someone else, but it's just as easy to do it myself"? Or maybe you say, "This task is too complicated to delegate. I have to make sure it's done right."
If so, I hope you like your job. Because you aren't going anyplace higher. Delegation can be difficult to learn because it looks like a huge risk and a huge leap of faith. But it doesn't have to be that way. There are techniques that you can learn that will help you delegate and get you out of the detail. And you have to get out of the detail if you really want to be an executive.
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