Catalysts include setting clear goals, allowing autonomy, providing sufficient resources and time, helping with the work, openly learning from problems and successes, and allowing a free exchange of ideas. Related: How…
The Power of Small Wins
It turns out that ordinary scientists, marketers, programmers, and other unsung knowledge workers, whose jobs require creative productivity every day, have more in common with famous innovators than most managers…
A Model Manager — and a Tool for Emulating Him
Our model manager is Graham, whom we observed leading a small team of chemical engineers within a multinational European firm. The mission of the team’s NewPoly project was clear and…
How Work Gets Stripped of Its Meaning
One Managers may dismiss the importance of employees’ work or ideas. Consider the case of Richard, a senior lab technician at a chemical company, who found meaning in helping his…
The Daily Progress Checklist
Near the end of each work day, use this checklist to review the day and plan your managerial actions for the next day. After a few days, you will be…
A Leader With An Eye On Tomorrow
Vital stats Tsholo Kubheka Designation: Sales Director Company: Virgin Active Health Clubs Sales Team: 650 national sales consultants, 114 sales managers, 17 area sales managers, five regional sales managers, a head…
Why you Should Work on a Sunday Night
If your calendar for the week is essentially empty at this point on a Sunday night, you’re prepared to be reactive instead of proactive this week. Instead of working on…
How to Look Instantly More Intelligent
Gain the upper hand in initial meetings by understanding the signs people interpret in their first impressions of strangers. Psychologists have found that we form an opinion of strangers in…
Accommodating Your Boss’s Work Style
Does he prefer a more formal and organised approach? Make sure that meetings with him have set agendas. Does she become impatient or inattentive when you veer off the topic…
Why Managing Up Matters
Why is it so hard to find a treatment of boss-employee relations that doesn’t characterise the boss as an ass or a psychotic and the subordinate as a helpless underling?…