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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.

Hourly employees know that if they work overtime, their employer must pay them for the extra hours. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean they can work OT whenever they feel like it. Here’s how to end unauthorized overtime:

Despite talk about flattening hierarchies, leaders still call the shots. “For successful leaders, the way you manage is much more Machiavellian than is conventionally perceived today,” says Noel Tichy, University of Michigan professor and change agent at General Electric.

How do you distinguish the urgent from the important? Without knowing, you could easily focus on incremental stuff all day long. One idea: For a period of time—say, between 7 and 10 a.m.—do nothing but focus on long-term projects ...

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.