Some leaders earn their berth through their execution skills. Others get ahead through their ideas. Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot fell into the second group.
Leaders & Managers
From the nitty gritty of daily management to addressing your aspirations of leadership, this section for leaders & managers tells you how to make strong leadership decisions, build effective teams, delegate and stay above the everyday management muddle.
Get tips, strategies, tool and advice on: performance reviews, preventing workplace violence, best-practices leadership, team building, leadership skills, people management and management training.
Leaders don’t need to be flamboyant. In fact, sometimes they can seem invisible. Take umpires ...
You might need leadership training if: 1. Your employees lie to you. 2. Nobody tries to poach your employees. 3. You’re always in crisis. 4. You ask yourself what you should do legally, instead of what’s the right thing to do. 5. You hog credit.
Legendary Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham developed her tough leadership style during battles that almost sank the newspaper in the 1970s. Plagued almost daily by printers’ and pressmen’s slowdown tactics and bullying tactics from their unions, Graham worried nightly whether the next day’s paper would get out on time.
Some say Microsoft's “stack ranking” policy crippled the company’s ability to innovate. “Stack ranking” is a system that forces each functional unit to rate every employee as a top performer, a good performer, average or poor.
Clarence Birdseye was the classic American inventor who became rich by finding marketable solutions to everyday problems. Before his company came along in the early 20th century, frozen food was so bad that New York state ruled it inedible for prisoners.
If you give somebody a bad grade without explanation, that’s not acceptable, says Laura Yecies, CEO of online storage service SugarSync. Yecies fights the impulse by reading every performance review—not so much to see if she agrees with the assessment but to check whether the manager is being thoughtful.
This season, the Washington Nationals have stood at or near the top of their division because they have a skipper who knows how to lead: Davey Johnson.
Your innovation methods should produce a bunch of ideas, including “crazy” ones. After paring them down based on critique and analysis, have your designers try out the surviving ideas with “cheap and dirty” prototypes.
Workplace violence is a serious problem that all employers must be prepared to address. Issues include analyzing what incidents are likely to trigger violence in the workplace; whether workplace violence policies can apply to verbal threats; what to do in cases of actual fighting or physical violence; and even outside events like domestic violence situations.
