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.
Q. We’re considering buying another company in the same industry. That company has a unionized workforce, and our executives are concerned because they don’t want to deal with a union. Otherwise, though, they are positive about this possibility ... If we buy this company, will we have to deal with the union?
Executive Leadership is pleased to present this time-machine interview with Thomas Alva Edison, who perfected the art of invention in 19th century America and touched off a technological revolution in the 20th century.
Frances Hesselbein, who led the Girls Scouts of the USA from 1976 to 1990, was named the “Best Nonprofit Manager in America” by Fortune magazine. But what makes her truly remarkable as a leader isn’t that so many people think of her as an outstanding leader. What’s exceptional is the way she gets others to think of themselves as leaders.
Before administrative professional Ilja Kraag wrestles for too long with a difficult task at work, she checks in with her peers. “How do you do it?” she asks them. That trait—reaching out to others—is what makes Kraag a natural leader. The org chart may not show it, but Kraag leads her peers by setting the right example.
Larry Brown is one of the few guys who successfully coached both college and pro basketball: the Denver Nuggets, UCLA and the New York Knicks. For starters, he’s old-school: stubborn, passionate and tough on know-it-alls.
The owners of a restaurant, apparently attempting to capitalize on the growing popularity of cooking as art, have lost their argument that a cook is exempt from overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
More than ever, work is collaborative. And where do things go wrong when it comes to collaborative work? At the handoff. It’s usually not because someone is incompetent or lazy; it’s due to poor communication. The bottom line: We all need checklists. Use or adapt this “handoff checklist” when delivering a project assignment, suggests the Harvard Business Review blog.
Lay yourself off? That’s what the owner of Accurate Background Check in Florida did when business slowed down. She took another job and retained her nine longtime employees.
If the IRS determines that an employee has been misclassified as an independent contractor, it may assess federal employment taxes plus interest and penalties. These matters frequently end up in the courts. As the following case shows, it’s unlikely you can claim you’re an independent contractor if you own and run the business.
In college, Ian Ballantine wrote a paper on the potential profitability of paperback books. At that time, paperbacks were associated with “trash novels,” but one publishing house, Penguin, was publishing paperback editions of mainstream books. Penguin snapped up Ballantine, who later founded Ballantine Books.
