What does it mean to act "like a boss" in your opinion? Does it mean managing your employees every move or empowering them to find their own way? Does it mean setting a process you expect everyone follow implicitly or working with your team to find a system that works for everyone? Honestly, no one wants to admit to micromanaging employees’ performance. Yet you may have … [Read more...]
Integrity Is Not Optional
“It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.” —Will Rogers These days, we're hearing so much about the integrity of our political and corporate leaders. But what does integrity mean? It means being honest, moral and ethical. It means doing what is right for the common good, not fulfilling some personal agenda. It means putting others … [Read more...]
Improve Team Productivity With 3 Attention Management Strategies
This is a guest post by Maura Nevel Thomas, an award-winning international speaker and trainer on productivity and work-life balance. As a new team leader, you’re faced with a challenge. Employee productivity is now at least in part, up to you. How will you increase your team's productivity so you can continue to drive value at your company? As a first step, I encourage … [Read more...]
Get Comfortable With Employees’ Mistakes
One of my favorite leadership anecdotes involves my daughter when she was just learning to drive. Several years ago, my daughter and I had to drive about thirty miles on county roads through rural Indiana. Snow was not falling on the day we made this drive. However, there was plenty of snow in the fields on either side of the roads and the wind was blowing. Under these … [Read more...]
Coaching is More Than Just Sharing Your Knowledge
You have likely risen to your current role because you have some expertise. That expertise could be in the technical nature of your team’s work, for example, you were a great sales person, so you were promoted to sales manager, or you were the top engineer so you were promoted to chief engineer. You may have proven to have superior leadership skills so you advanced, or you may … [Read more...]
What to Do When Employees Mess Up
No doubt it's frustrating when an employee does a lousy job on work you assigned him or her. As the manager, you often have to spend time revising the work, cleaning up your employee's mistakes and taking blame for the unsatisfactory work from your own boss. That is why so many first time managers refuse to delegate. After all, it's easier to just do the work yourself … [Read more...]
Employee Orientation Matters: Here’s How to Nail It
How important is your orientation period? According to research by Glassdoor, very important: Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent. That's a big deal, and yet, only 12 percent of employees strongly agree that their organizations did a great job of onboarding them, according to … [Read more...]
10 Things Your Employees are Thinking
This is a guest post from Roberta Chinsky Matuson. If you think it’s tough being a manager these days, try being an employee. Most are in the position of having to go with the flow, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they do so with a smile on their face. Here are 10 things your employees wish you knew about them: "We are happy to have a job." But that doesn’t necessarily … [Read more...]
7 Ways to Become a More Amazing Boss
The smartest thing you can do as both a leader and an employee is proactively look for ways to improve your skills. Attend training (our next Bud to Boss online workshop starts in May!) and read as many leadership blogs, books and whitepapers as you can. As important, however, is that you look for learning opportunities in your daily routine. If you want to be the type of … [Read more...]
Leadership Lessons from a Rainy Day
After several perfect spring days here where I live in Virginia, today has been nothing but dreary, chilly and rainy. The high I experienced early this week of being outdoors with my children has pretty much disappeared, and I find myself feeling grumpy, unmotivated and pessimistic. It's not in my nature to be any of those things, so it's prompted me to think about life, and … [Read more...]