Today there is great weight put on a person's attitude. It is as if this is something for which they are individually responsible and should be held to account for. The inference seems to be that no matter what you do the way that you approach it is your responsibility. For example, you work for a meat wholesaler and your job is to get up and four O'clock every morning to be at work for five. You spend the next twelve hours throwing large lumps of meat around then go home to rest and get ready More..

Turning a Negative Employee Into a Positive Asset

Several years ago, I took over the supervision of a section in a Public Agency. I was a newbie in management, enthusiastic, and excited about the opportunity that lay before me. I was informed by my manager that I had a problem employee on my team. He described her as unpleasant, resistant, not a team player and told me that I would have my hands full managing her. He stated that she had been forced upon him by another department and now we had to deal with her. I listened and filed his comments More..

Successful Managing Through Delegation

Managers should avoid the tendency to constantly delegate to the same one or two capable individuals. This practice only overloads the best personnel while slighting all others. As with delegation in general, there may be occasions in which work must be divided among several individuals for example, highly technical or complex tasks. Should this be the case, the rule is always - delegate the maximum amount of work to the lowest possible level. Whenever possible, managers should delegate a whol More..

Status Quo Pep Talks That Can Threaten Your Leadership

Organizations live and die by results. Yet most organizations get a fraction of the results they are capable of. There are many reasons for this: poor strategy, poor leadership, insufficient resources, etc. But one main reason is overlooked by most leaders. Many organizations stumble because they are permeated with a robust status quo. The trouble with the status quo isn't that it gets poor results. After all, if you know you're getting poor results, you can do something about it. You can start More..

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. Yet, a manager has the accountability to deliver - in fact that's what they get paid for, so ultimately, they must be the one who puts in the most effort to make their workplace deliver, or else. When a manager tries to delegate, their people don't always do as they More..

Follow Up: It Makes A Difference

A while back the headlight switch on our minivan quit working, so early one Saturday morning we took it to the neighborhood repair shop that has been mailing postcards to us the past three years. They said it would take 90 minutes to check things out. Three hours later we call: still haven't gotten to it, but it's up next. Two hours after that we call again: he's looking at it right now. Three more hours, another call: yep, it's broken, but we can't get the part until Monday. We decide to pick More..

The Three-category Approach to Performance Management: Effort, Ability, or Environment

Performance Management is the act of managing personal or organizational performance. What can complicate this process are all the factors that can arise where a textbook process meets the situations and people that exist in your world. As an effective director, manager, or supervisor it is your job to ensure the success of the organization by achieving of all key performance indicators. These targets or goals are accomplished through the implementation and execution of a solid Performance Mana More..

Business Fit

I have been an entrepreneur for over twenty years and have absolutely embraced information that would help maintain a well managed and profitable business. We have been a part of the information era for sometime now. As business owners, we have access to more information than ever in this generation of technology. But how can we use this technology to aid our business? Today's business environment creates both opportunities and challenges. Powerful technology, including the internet, provides a More..

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Beyond Management Coaching: When Things Are Getting Out of Control

Leaders and Managers often ask us, 'What do you do when you have tried to coach and counsel an employee about a performance concern, and the employee has not responded? Unfortunately, we see far too many cases where the leader hasn't, in good faith, tried to coach the employee or to put the leader's concerns into words. Often, leaders look for a quick fix alternative to what is perceived as a difficult and painful confrontation. We have also learned from first-hand experience that management c More..

The High Cost of Employee Turnover Among Project Managers

Imagine for a moment this scenario from a frustrated Senior Manager of a large pharmaceutical organization: "Our organization has experienced a large turnover among project managers in the past year. This creates problems providing ongoing quality and service to our stakeholders. We just don't know what is causing the problem!" Sound familiar? Well you're not alone. I remember that filmmaker Woody Allen once said that "80% of success is showing up." However, the greater challenge is finding ways More..

Take The Guesswork Out Of Problem Solving

In today's chaotic world and uncertain economic times too many good people are burdened by too many problems that seem insurmountable and too many businesses find it increasingly difficult to compete effectively. The old traditional methods of finding solutions to these problems don't seem to work like they used to. In fact, the world seems more burdened today with more complex problems than at any time in history. What the world needs is a brand new, reliable approach that DOES work. I think I More..

Phone Sex is Bad for Business

On August 3rd/2005, Reuters reported that a German man had colluded with a phone sex operator to defraud his employer's company out of approximately 16,000 Euro or almost 20,000 US dollars, by making 160 phone calls over a year and a half from work. He apparently split the profits 50/50 with the phone sex operator. The courts convicted the man and gave him a suspended sentence of eight months. Does your company have a written communications policy, and are your employees aware of its existence? More..

The Golden Key to Meeting Success

We all attend many meetings. I'm sure you have been to some great meetings and some poor ones. Unfortunately for everyone I've ever talked to, the number of poor ones far outweighs the number of great ones. The fact is that most meetings are too long, unfocused, too frustrating, and unproductive. And yet meetings are a valuable way to gain collective understanding, buy-in, agreement, and consensus. They help us find better solutions and create cooperation, collaboration, colleagueship, and com More..

Problem Solving the Problem Solving Meeting

We go to meetings to share information, to report on project status, to make decisions, to get the free lunch, and because we were invited. (Sorry that I digressed). This is only a partial list - there are many other valid reasons for holding meetings. Perhaps the most common and best reason for a meeting though is to solve a problem. A meeting is a great place to do this - you get a variety of people with a variety of experiences, knowledge and perspectives together to ensure that the best pos More..

Accountability Equals Meeting Success

Leslie was the new manager of the group. She was replacing Tom, a well respected manager who was retiring. Once she arrived, she made it one of her first priorities to sit down with everyone on the team and get to know them. Beyond pleasantries though she wanted to get to know each individual, what they saw as their goals and objectives, and how they thought she could help them. As she started having these meetings some common themes came out - not about the individuals so much as about the tea More..

Management Development - Micromanagement Works!

Getting into the detail of everything each of your people does, will really damage your relationships with them. Sure, there are times where their hand needs to be held, and then there are times when you have to be sensitive enough to their needs to back off and let them learn for themselves. Indeed, sometimes you have to brace yourself, but that's how a child learns, from getting things wrong - so it's OK to step away and let it happen. However, if you have your nose in everyone else's work, More..

Regaining Control - Nine Steps for New Managers

My client had faced the same challenge, which was frustrating as well as intimidating for him as well - yet he was determined to break the mould. With my background in a similar business, I have faced this several times. In fact there was almost always an underlying individual who seemed to 'run the place', in spite of there being a manager before me! The challenge was to wrest control back and manage myself. And deliver the results which had been missing on every occasion. Over time, I found More..

Qualities of a Great Manager

In the call center environment we are often only as successful as the people we hire. While our front line employees are critical to our business, choosing the right managers powerfully impact your success. So what makes a good manager? Ask 100 people and you might get 100 different answers. While the behaviors that make a great manager may be open to interpretation, there are some competencies and corresponding questions, which stand the test of time. I think the face of business has entered a More..

Allowing Employees Responsibility

Merely assigning a task with detailed instructions is not effective delegation. An employee cannot grow without the freedom to make decisions on how the job should be done. Managers must also be aware that only through the conjunction of responsibility and authority can the desired results be achieved. Additionally, a delegate must be held accountable for his or her actions. After a manager has delegated a task to a subordinate, he or she must not take it back, make changes in the assignment, o More..

Diversity Training: The Worst Possible Reasons to Request Executive Funding

You're on your organization's diversity committee. You have the best of intentions. And that's the problem. It leads you to appeal for funding for all the wrong reasons. Take healthcare for example. The US foreign-born population comprises a larger segment than at any time in the past five decades. And this trend is expected to continue(1). People of diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural heritage suffer disproportionately from cardiovascular disease, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and every form of cance More..

Directed Introspection

One of the greatest obstacles to progress can often be our awareness of past failures. If we tried something a couple of years ago and fell flat on our faces (and especially if we were ridiculed or derided as a result) we tend to be reluctant to rock the boat again. When we believe that history will repeat itself, we become paralysed by fear. Mentoring managers through a process that I sometimes refer to as "directed introspection" in order to expose attitudes and prejudices can often produce s More..

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7 Essential Elements To Every Organizational Change

[This article is based on excerpts from the special report "Overcoming Resistance to Change" by Dr. Mike Beitler.] Senior management often creates a plan for implementing an organizational change while completely ignoring the following elements necessary for every organizational change. Without these elements the attempted changes will always create a large amount of resistance. Change leaders and facilitators beware! 1. Involve the people who will be affecting (and affected by) the change. (N More..

Outsourced Learning: Are You Ready for Learning BPO?

As the business world enters a period of hyper-competitiveness, every business process will be subjected to examination and possible restructuring. We have already seen outsourcing and offshoring used to an extent what nobody would have dreamed of a few years ago. McDonald's is testing the offshoring of its drive-thru process to India. How about, "Do you want fries with that?" with a New Delhi accent? Even though McDonald's testing of business process outsourcing (BPO) has caused quite a stir, More..

Building the Trust in Your Employees - 12 Easy Tips

In Stephen Covey's great book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", he talks about the 'emotional bank account', where you have to build a credit in your relationship with the individuals who you work with (and everyone else as well!). If what you do isn't 'trustworthy', then all you have done in your gentle listening and asking great and interested questions to build, is to 'debit' your account. And if you do more of this than the credit you build, then you will never get your folks More..

A Leadership Lesson: Two Guys With Guns

PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.com Word count: 768 A Leadership Lesson: Two Guys With Guns by Brent Filson Raymond Chandler author of the famous Philip Marlowe detective stories advised writers suffering from wr More..

The 5 Obsessions of a Passionate Employee

A recent report entitled "How Google Grows?and Grows?and Grows" stated that the 650 people that work at Google are the most passionate bunch of geeks in the high tech industry. Google was also recently called the fastest growing company in history. To mimic their growth and success, passion must be injected into every level of your organization. The quickest and easiest way to do this is to hire passionate people. Passion is an easy thing to spot once you know where to look. By understanding th More..

A Facilitators Guide to Running a Stakeholder Analysis Workshop

This facilitator's guide to running a stakeholder analysis workshop is for people whose success depends on getting other people involved with their objectives. It contains two exercises, one to work with stakeholder groups, and one to emulate stakeholders where it is not easy to bring them all together. The aim of both is to engage stakeholders in dialogue, brainstorming and decision-making to secure their buy-in to an idea, project, or plan. There are five key principles underpinning success More..

Time for Change - Clearing the First Hurdle

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it." A.A. Milne (1882 - 1956), Winnie the Pooh Absolutely vital to any business change is allocating some time to do it. Sadly, most companies find themselves in the position of poor Edward Bear when it comes t More..

How to Build Your Business and Still Take Time Off

We all know people who are like human dynamos. They seem to make an art form of building their business and still enjoy quality time with friends and family. It isn't magic, you can do it too. The world of business ownership or management is inhabited by two main personality types. There are people who never miss deadlines, who can be replied upon to deliver the goods whatever the odds and, who seem to thrive under pressure. Then there are people who achieve very little and yet seem to be perma More..

Can A Business Still Be Profitable When People Skills Are Absent?

In our current world of rapid and amazing technological advances, many entrepreneurs have managed to dramatically limit the need for staff in highly profitable operations of all kinds. It is therefore tempting and believable to imagine that with every passing day, the need for people skills is diminishing. In fact most entrepreneurs are convinced that one no longer requires people skills to run a highly profitable enterprise. After all technology can do it all for you. This is both an unfortun More..

Have You Always Thought That The Best Ideas Come From Research Or Management? Think Again

Many entrepreneurs and chief executive officers are unaware that there are many factors that put ordinary workers at a great advantage over R&D and management when it comes to generating useful improvement ideas and even new products ideas for a corporation. The people in research are usually hindered by the fact that it is difficult for them to stay in touch with the day to day running of the business and the problems that arise. Usually they will be following and developing a particular i More..

Work Life a Balancing Act

Australians are loosing their laidback, carefree reputation, as we continue to work longer hours, exercise less and neglect our leisure and family time. Recent research indicates that 67 per cent of Australian professionals spend at least 20 hours a week thinking about their job when they should be relaxing, and less than half take their entitled annual leave. Why is juggling work and life priorities an increasingly difficult challenge for many people? Could it be we are trying to pack more a More..

Lets Flourish and Prosper!

Some say that in business as in sex: if it is good, it's great and if it is bad it's still pretty good. This does not happen to be true. If business is bad, it can get very bad. There are personnel problems, production expenses, overhead, laws, taxes, fines. Faulty financial decisions, inability to accurately evaluate the situation and quickly resolve problems all lead to an extremely high mortality rate among new business: up to 95% do not survive past their first 12 months. Modern business ma More..

The Myth Of Relationship Selling Revealed At Last

The second you quit being the 'best deal' for your customer, he'll drop you like a hot potato. Regardless of how many lunches you've bought him or birthdays you've remembered. Every business we've ever consulted tells us the same thing about their sales force. They say that their industry is different from all the others and the only effective way for their salespeople to sell is to build buddy-buddy relationships with their prospects and customers. We hear it from printers, bankers, jewelers, More..

Where Else in Your Business Do You Accept a 60% Failure Rate?

I recently surveyed CEOs and Business Leaders of large companies and small, profit and not-for-profit, and I asked just them just one question: 'What is the single biggest factor that you believe will inhibit your sustained profitable growth into the future?' A, perhaps, surprising 37% responded that it was people - the recruitment, motivation and retention of people that was the biggest factor. So let's address the first one - recruitment. I see many, many businesses through a year from the v More..

Enable Continuous Improvement of IT Services through ITIL

One of the major benefits, if not THE benefit of process orientated approaches to managing your IT services and infrastructure is that it enables continuous improvement. This means that you are never totally satisfied with the current state of affairs and that you always want to improve your services. I mean, it is the way life is to always set higher standards or aim for higher goals, otherwise life can become a little boring. The reason why ITIL enables continuous improvement is that it allo More..

Problem-Solving Success Tip: Whatever You Do, Do It on Purpose

Decision-making shows up throughout the problem-solving process. The decisions may be difficult or unpopular, so it's very tempting to ignore some of them. Imitating an ostrich, however, is a wimpy way to decide not to change anything-and is quite likely to leave you making awkward explanations later. ? Make conscious decisions: whether to proceed or not, which path to take, etc. ? Know why you made the decision you did, ? Be able to explain it (and offer alternatives). The first big decision More..

Commercial Collections Billing Practices Advice

Swiftness is the key to collecting past due commercial accounts because commercial accounts depreciate more faster than consumer accounts. In creating and implementing a billing system, a credit grantor should recognize that time is the safest refuge of any debtor. The more time they are given, the less likely they are to pay. Hence, sales documents should be explicit about payment terms, return privileges, interest charges on overdue accounts, guarantee and service costs. Various Commercial C More..

How To Write Commercial Collections Letters

It is sometimes valuable to bring the sales manager into this step of the collection process. Information concerning the delinquency can often be obtained from the sales department. Tips for Commercial Collection Letters: When writing commercial collection letters, these points should be considered: Include all basic information. The commercial collections letter should state how and when you expect payment. It should suggest why the account should be paid in full. It should motivate the debto More..

Learn How To Get The Most From Your Team

Being a leader isn't easy. Every one looks to you to make decisions, resolve disputes, and to carry all the responsibility. Being a leader can be a lonely job. Some of us are born into leadership. For them it is effortless effort. They have no qualms (or at least they know how to hide them) about making tough decisions, about taking the responsibility, and knowing that it can lead to resentment and isolation from other team members. Others are forced into it. They find themselves taking over t More..

Does My Bum Look Big in This?

If a good manager asks his workforce for their opinion of him he will receive their expressions of approval and be satisfied that he is doing a good job. If a bad manager asks his workforce for their opinion then he too will receive their expressions of approval because as we all know, the best way to get a bad manager off your back is to agree with him. The problem for the manager is how to find out if he is good, and adding value to the organisation, or if he is bad, interfering and preventi More..

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. 1. Availability A good leader is available and in touch with people. An important leadership skill is the ability to recognize needs and be able to respond to them quickly an More..

A Comprehensive Sarbanes Oxley Act Summary

Individual and corporate security stand in the center of the Sarbanes Oxley Act summary, as they are the areas that suffered most changes. New criminal and civil penalties were announced for security violations and a new system of certification of internal audit efforts was set. With the new auditor independence provision, auditors from outside the system have been granted more access to company data. Other items comprised in the Sarbanes Oxley Act summary focus on an increased disclosure of com More..

Power of Pinpointing Accountability

I have always said that if I were to write a book on effective management principles, the first chapter in that book would be about the importance of pinpointing responsibility among an owner's or a general manager's reporting units. After all, one of the most popular definitions of management is getting work done through others. #1 Management Pitfall: An unwillingness to delegate. Many times the owner or general manager is the most knowledgeable and the most capable person in the company; he More..

Why You Need a Business Plan

This article was originally called "Do You Need a Business Plan?" The title was changed because in truth, every business needs a businessplan. It's a common misconception that business plans are used only for raisingcapital, as in "my bank wants to see a business plan before they will approve a loan,"or, "I need a business plan so I can get venture funding." But a business plan is really just what it sounds like: a plan for running yourbusiness. It's an essential tool for making sure that noth More..

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