Management Mastery

As the manager of a team, it’s important for you to learn about your team members’ skills, abilities, and personalities.  By also learning about their individual work styles you’ll be better able to put staff in roles where they can be most helpful to the team and successful for themselves.

One of the challenges for great leaders is to help their staff members achieve more than they thought they could.  This can be a relaxed partnership with high achievers but a difficult, knock-down, struggle with others on your team.  Helping staff achieve at their highest level is the subject of this episode.

Managers are under more pressure than ever.  They now report daily stress levels that are greater than the employees they lead, driven by role overload and their lack of control over work demands.  The best skills to use when under pressure is the subject of this episode.

The traditional use of power and authority has been to exercise strict control over others. However, that’s often not the best strategy.  More often, a better route is to go beyond exercising control to mobilizing others’ energy and commitment.  That’s the focus of this episode.

When skilled leaders meet with their staff members and ask, “What’s keeping you from being more productive?” The answer they often hear is about unnecessary rules, policies, and procedures that have long outlived their usefulness.  That’s the subject of this episode.

When an employee fails, managers usually don’t blame themselves.  Whatever the actual reason may be, the problem is assumed to be the employee’s fault and the employee’s responsibility.  But, what if the manager has also contributed to the poor performance?  That’s the focus of this week's episode.

In this episode we discuss both types of communicating: one-on-one and with groups.  HOW something is communicated is as important as WHAT is being communicated.

Communication skills, the ability to prepare, interact, and understand messages, are among the most important skills and abilities any leader must have to be successful. Preparation for communicating with one or more people is the focus of this episode.

The leader’s role is to build and maintain a high-performing team that outperforms the competition.  In a past episode we discussed EQ, the first of the core skills and abilities to be a successful leader.  In this episode we will discuss Relationship Building, another critical skill.

Whether you’re a new, or experienced, manager you’ll face problems at work.  The way that you approach solving them will prove to be an important aspect of your success.  In this encore episode we’ll discuss a good process to follow.

The leader’s role is to build and maintain a high-performing team that outperforms the competition.  In a past episode we discussed EQ, the first of the core skills and abilities to be a successful leader.  In this episode we will discuss Relationship Building, another critical skill.

Almost everyone has had the experience of working with a toxic coworker.  How to deal with that situation can be difficult and emotional.  It is not something that most people want to deal with, but it is in your interest, and the other persons, to work out the problem.  We will deal with ways that you can do that in this encore episode.

The leader’s role is to build and maintain a high-performing team that outperforms the competition.  In this episode of Management Mastery, we discuss Emotional Quotient or E.Q., one of the core skills and abilities needed to be a successful leader.  In future episodes we’ll discuss additional core skills and abilities important in being a successful leader. 

As the manager, the information you receive can be slanted toward a point of view, suspect, or compromised.  Taking steps to improve the information you receive can make a huge difference in your success.

Having done your preparation to ask for a promotion as we covered in our previous episode,  you’ll then need to schedule a meeting with your boss to discuss your career progress and to ask for a promotion.  It’s important that you prepare carefully for that meeting. How to prepare to meet with your boss to ask for a promotion is the topic of this episode.

Before you can consider asking for a promotion a number of things must happen.  You need to stand out in your current position, and you must build your case for a promotion.  

If you feel you’ve selected the wrong career field, don’t be upset.  Many people, young and old, at some point in their careers realize that another choice would provide a better alignment with their values, interests, and skills. Discussing making a career change is the focus of this week’s episode.

In assessing your career progress, achieving your business objectives will be one of your most important goals.  In this episode we’ll focus on those things that you should be doing to successfully achieve those objectives, and provide some suggestions about what you can do if you’re not achieving them.

If you already know your career goals consider yourself lucky.  Many of us don’t really know our career goals and passions and it becomes a matter of investigating and questioning before we identify a direction.  The purpose of this episode is to help you think through that process.

Every manager, at some time, has to fire an employee.  It is one of the most difficult tasks a manager has, but it must be done caringly and professionally.  Layoffs are a special subset of termination. We’ll discuss the process for both in this Encore episode.

There are a number of honest mistakes new managers often make.  In this Encore episode, we discuss three of the most common and often some of the hardest to totally avoid making. 

There are a number of ways you can stand out as a performer in your company or department.  All of them require you to have mastered all aspects of your current role first, and then to have your head up so that you’re listening, observing, and understanding the goals of your department and company.  In this way you’ll be able to be productive for your department and yourself.  We’ll talk about tha...

Major changes can be upsetting in any organization, no matter what kind of change it is. The manager’s responsibility in such cases is to communicate clearly and effectively about the change as much as possible in order to keep rumors and unnecessary anxieties at a minimum. We’ll discuss several of the pitfalls in this kind of situation and how managers can avoid falling into them in this episode...

Power dynamics are essentially the ways in which influence and control are manifested among individuals or groups and how they impact or controls relationships and interactions.  Power Dynamics include both formal authority as well as informal influence, They exist in both the workplace as well as in social settings.  We will examine power dynamics over the next few episodes as they are a critical...

Do you know your boss’s goals and specific objectives? If you answered “Yes” to that question you’re ahead of a number of your colleagues. If you answered “No” then you have an opportunity to make up ground. We’ll discuss some ways to do that in this episode.