Manager training and development culminates with participants creating a Management Action Plan. See in this image what a participant created after completing the Manager Training Series. Bravo!

Managers, I think it’s time we take this job more seriously. Even if you’re the type of person that reads all of the management books and listens to all of the podcasts on how to lead your team I bet you are underestimating the impact that you have on your direct reports.

It can be hard to know what to do when, say, someone shows up with a certain political flag on the back of their truck, or a barrage of far-leaning stickers on a water bottle, or simply goes over the top with their own political convictions making staff or clients uncomfortable.

What do you do about the weird things in the office? Managers often have to take on a little bit more than simply managing in the workplace, especially when personal lines get crossed.

I hear from managers about the disorder that happens in the workplaces. They are tired, bewildered, and don’t know how to fix the system that they created or in some cases inherited. While doing the great work of delivering client projects, helping earn new business we sometimes forget the critical work of developing a team and sustainable systems to make the work and workplace thrive. So, we live in this place of antiquated systems, tools, processes and wonder how to unravel this ball of yarn, but then another client deliverable is due and the job of working on the team is set aside.

When it comes to leading a team do you find your default management style is putting out fires? If so, you may want to read on to make your life easier.

How to maintain connections at work among hybrid teams.

Everyone needs one, you’re supposed to read it on your first day, but after your eyes cross from flipping through a bunch of pages in a binder that all look the same, is it any wonder that people tend to forget about them until something goes wrong?

Saying your business is like a family might feel warm and delightful to you but to your employees, it could bring up memories that are not so rosy.  Families are complicated. Workplaces should be much more straightforward, based on agreed-upon practices, and hopefully less emotionally intertwined.

Something’s off. People aren’t talking. They’re working in silos. Engagement is falling fast, and miscommunications are on the rise. It’s one of the most challenging situations a manager can encounter: a bad team culture.

Here’s the bad news: it’s not going to fix itself. As the manager, you’re responsible for creating, managing, and recreating the team culture as needed.

Making generalizations about generations is always going to require painting with some broad brushstrokes –– but I have noticed some trends about managers lately that seem to be holding true across many of the businesses I work with.

Engagement and retention have been top concerns for companies over the past several years, and it looks like they’ll remain issues for some time to come. While some of the factors impacting the way people stay or go in their careers is out of your control, you actually have a lot more power in this area than you might think.

The only thing worse is when you give someone feedback and they sit there, smile and nod, and tell you they’ll be sure to keep it in mind ... only for you to find out weeks or months later they just ignored you and kept on doing things how they wanted to do them.

We all know how important it is to work from a set of shared values –– it’s one of the most powerful predictive factors for employee engagement and high performance, plus, it encourages a sense of camaraderie and makes being at work much more enjoyable.