If you find yourself in a place where your skills are being tested, try adding one – or more – of these time-tested and proven successful strategies to your management style repertoire: 1. Great leaders exhibit great calm – Truly powerful people have an air of calm about them. This helps those around them act more rationally and be more successful pushing the organization through difficult times. Exhibit calmness at all times. It will become your nature. 2. Recognize that there is always more time than it seems - Too many mistakes are made by those bosses who think that decisions...

#1: Listening and communicating effectively Have you ever worked with a person who always says yes but never delivers what you need? Many of us have felt the frustration of that scenario, so it’s exciting to work with somebody who takes the time to understand a problem while also asking the key questions to ensure that all expectations are met. #2: Being energetic Employees with energy tend to lift up the people around them. Leaders sometimes need to be able to boost a team when they are working on tough projects, and having this trait can make a big difference in the long run. #3: Remaining...

Bias against action: There are always plenty of reasons not to take a decision, reasons to wait for more information, more options, more opinions. But real leaders display a consistent bias for action. People who don’t make mistakes generally don’t make anything. Legendary ad man David Ogilvy argued that a good decision today is worth far more than a perfect decision next month. Beware prevaricators. Secrecy: “We can’t tell the staff,” is something I hear managers say repeatedly. They defend this position with the argument that staff will be distracted, confused or simply unable to...

Yesterday I posted on Team Building, I mentioned in that post that I’ll post about the tasks one by one later. So here I am with the first task for my Team Building workshop. This task is named “Rabbit, Archer or Wall” - In this there are two teams. - Each team has to choose the character they want to be they can either be Rabbit or Archer or Wall - All the team members have to be same character, so the character has to be told to everyone in the team. The team here decides what they want to be. - Both teams are given 30 seconds to decide who they are. - After 30 seconds both...

#1: Focus on results and productivity and not the time clock When you manage salaried knowledge workers, you should almost never have rigid clock-in/clock-out times unless there is a coverage issue in relation to serving customers (e.g., maintaining adequate help desk coverage during call hours). Instead, set clear goals that you know should take your employees about 40 hours/week to accomplish. Require that they show up on time for important meetings and are available during the team’s general working hours. Provide them with the tools to access their work remotely, when needed. Then let...