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.
Google, the king of search engines, recently set out on a search of its own—to identify the qualities that make the highest quality managers at Google Inc., and then to replicate those qualities across the entire company. The end result: a simple, yet elegant, list of eight management practices that the best Google managers consistently do.
Regular attendance is obviously a key job function for most of your employees. But despite your freedom to set and enforce attendance rules, you also face key legal hurdles to your attendance policy, including complying with the FMLA and ADA. Manage absenteeism by establishing a reasonable and specific attendance policy that incorporates your organization’s needs and the functional requirements of various work areas and employee functions. A sound attendance policy should cover all of the following:
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is so committed to job creation that he’s pledged to take at least $100,000 from the annual profits of two Starbucks shops in Los Angeles and Harlem, and reinvest it in those neighborhoods. His goal: improving education and job training for local young adults.
Copying what works for one leader and applying it in your own workplace can bring poor results. Moving from good to great means knowing who you are and what you are meant to do.
Many employees believe that the FMLA and its state counterpart, the Minnesota Parental Leave Act (MPLA), absolutely prevent an employer from terminating someone who asks for or takes parental leave. That’s not the case.
Employees who have lost their jobs have very little to lose and everything to gain by suing their former employers. Your best defense when firing: Always carefully document a performance-related reason for the termination. That will trump all but the most egregious cases of supervisory expressions of bigotry.
Charlie Munger, able partner of financier Warren Buffett, got frustrated early in his career because, as Buffett describes it, “he thought he was smarter than everyone else he was working for. So he decided he was going to do something smart for his most important client—himself ..."
In 2007, CEO Michael Lewis, ILD Corp., knew about social-networking sites but he didn’t participate in any of them. The wake-up call came when an employee googled ILD Corp. and the result was ugly: dozens of customer complaints about charges and billing. Thus began Lewis’ migration from the back pew to the pulpit, where social media is concerned.
Ever wonder who was the first woman to appear on the Wheaties cereal box? It was Elinor Smith, the “Flying Flapper.” She made her first solo flight at age 15 and was one of the youngest Americans to earn a pilot’s license. By age 17, Smith was taking passengers on short hops and by age 18 she was running her own sightseeing business. Among the many risks she took was a wild dare from some boys in her high school that has never been repeated.
Just the facts, ma'am. Your employee handbooks should clearly state your organization's rules and benefits without including any excess or superfluous language. If you embellish the document with needless explanations, you may end up eating your words ...
