Being a great manager and English gardening have more in common than you might imagine. If you want to improve your leadership skills, there no shortage of analogies that have been made about great managers. A great manager is a “coach,” a “captain of a ship,” or even a “human shield.” However, I heard a…
If you’re looking for the best employee engagement survey questions, these 32 questions have the highest response rates in Know Your Team – and share four distinct characteristics. “How engaged are my employees, really?” We ask ourselves this, as leaders – and then write our employee engagement surveys questions, determined to find an answer. Yet…
Here are the 5 most telling signs of micromanagement – and what you can do instead. I won’t tell anyone: You think you might be a micromanager. Argh. If there were scarlet letters for a bad manager to wear, “m-i-c-r-o-m-a-n-a-g-e-r” would be among them. But, how do you know if you’re a micromanager, for sure? …
Six things to consider when managing managers instead of individual contributors. “What’s the biggest difference between managing managers versus managing individual contributors?” I recently was asked this question at a conference I spoke at in the United Kingdom. Then a few days later, funnily enough, this same question was the central topic at a panel…
We all know we’re supposed to “work on the business and not in the business” as a leader… but what holds us back? And, how do you exactly put “stepping away” into practice? “Work on the business, not in the business. Pause. Step back. Take stock. Reflect. “ This is some of the most ubiquitous…
Instead of promising you quick ‘n easy answers, this new manager checklist probes deeper with 4 questions to help you become better as a leader. You want the answer. The silver bullet, the trick, the hack, the leadership best practice, the new manager checklist. There’s got to be some secret point of leverage that you…
Best practices from 1,000+ managers on how to share progress with your team as a leader.
17 phrases and suggestions to avoid the common leadership weakness of coming across as too controlling as a manager. Recently, a manager told me how he’d received feedback from his team about his greatest leadership weakness. “I come across as too intense or controlling,” he admitted. Genuinely concerned, he then asked me, “What can I…
Here’s one way to create more mental wriggle room for yourself in tough situations as a leader. Before you figure out what to do, you must first figure out how to think as a leader. But what if you’re not even sure what to think? A direct report who’s well-liked by the team is underperforming,…
We don’t ask ourselves this enough. Here are 6 critical questions to reflect on when considering if you should become a manager or not. When we’re asked, “Do you want to become a manager?” we often assume there is only one answer. “Oh, of course I want to be a manager.” Right? Who doesn’t? Especially…