Just like in the children’s story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the best managers know how to strike a balance between being too tough or too easy on employees. The ‘too tough’ manager is mistakenly seen as an effective leader. Being ruthless might appear strong at first but when overplayed employees will become disengaged […]
Category: Employee Engagement
Turnover at the top
One supervisor was counting up the number of plant managers he had seen come and go during the past five years. There were seven different people at the top, each with their own agenda. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that employees might roll their eyes at yet another imperative change coming from a […]
Leaders need to clarify what employees are trying to say
Even when the leader is trained to be a more effective communicator, it is quite possible that the leader’s frustration with employees might derail any improvement in communication skills. Without training everyone on how to be a better communicator, the leader can take some steps to help ensure that employees get their point across. We’ll […]
What about the followers?
Over a coffee with a colleague, she shared with me an interesting trend emerging in followership. For decades, most training and development has been focused on executives, managers and front line supervisors with the justification that improvements made at those higher levels will be reflected in the behavior and results of the staff at the […]
Avoid bias as a new boss
Typically a newly transferred manager takes time to review the personnel files of his staff. This manager however did not want to become biased by reading the existing files. We’ll explore more on that below. Should a new manager read the personnel files of her team before sizing up the team for herself? My coaching […]