People Management

Stop the communication overkill: leadership tips

September 27, 2012

Here are three words of advice to communicate well: Make it count. Sending mass emails or holding un­­necessarily frequent meetings can test employees’ patience and distract them from higher-priority work.

Manage your managers, not their staff

August 29, 2012
This season, the Washington Nationals have stood at or near the top of their division because they have a skipper who knows how to lead: Davey Johnson.

Get better at doing nothing

August 24, 2012
The most successful leaders delegate almost all their regular work to their staff, which allows them to facilitate and orchestrate everyone else’s performance. But “doing nothing” is hard for people who have risen through the ranks for their ability “to do.” Two ways to get better at it:

4 ways to leverage your leadership

August 20, 2012

Observation and feedback are essential to your role as a leader. How to make sure you keep paying attention:

Can you keep a secret?

August 17, 2012
Here’s one skill no one will teach you that can make or break your career: the ability to keep a secret.

Tell ’em you’ve got their backs

August 17, 2012

Let managers know you’ll back them up—and then actually back them up. The most important thing you can say: “I will fight for you …”

You owe them an honest critique

August 8, 2012

If you give somebody a bad grade without explanation, that’s not acceptable, says Laura Yecies, CEO of online storage service SugarSync. Yecies fights the impulse by reading every performance review—not so much to see if she agrees with the assessment but to check whether the manager is being thoughtful.

How an F-bomb can hurt your career

July 31, 2012

Does swearing energize ­employees and demonstrate passion? Or does it cast a manager as out-of-control and unprofessional? Generally, the answer is the latter, say executive coaches and recruiters. But it depends. Used at the right time, with the right crowd, profanity can put a fine point on things.

Eliminate the passion killers

July 25, 2012

True leaders inspire employees to reach their potential. That’s a tall order. More often, leaders fall into the trap of becoming passion killers. One practical way forward is asking your team to catalog “passion killers.”

Tactics to increase employee feedback

June 26, 2012

Some ideas on getting candid feedback: To verify whether you’re hearing the truth, put mechanisms in place such as ombudsmen, hotlines and surveys. To encourage open dialogue, have lunch with small groups of employees …