10 Ways to Be a Better Manager

Management and leadership are two functions central to the success of any for-profit or non- profit enterprise. But they are two vastly different modes of operation. A manager’s job is to direct people or resources according to an established set of principals; a leader is there to spearhead and direct (essentially, the leader of a group sets the principles).

Remember, not all leaders make good managers and not all managers can lead. This week we’re going to focus on managers. So let’s explore the 10 key principles that will help you become the kind of manager people will love working for.

1. Know your business well. It ‘s key to be able to thoroughly understand everything about your organization from your product to your staff. You must also be able to talk intelligently about your financials and cash-flow.
2. Clearly define your personal expectations and responsibilities and make sure your employees understand the rewards and consequences.
3. Hire the best and fire the worst. Hire the best people possible and then reward them. If you have under-performing employees find a way to manage them out of the organization – this sounds harsh but negative employees will drag the whole organization down with them.
4. Be visible, approachable and available to your employees. Staff must know they can approach you and that you will listen to their needs. Don’t surround yourself with “gatekeepers.”
5. Be a teacher and a student until you die. Try to read the latest “best practices” in your field, attend workshops and conferences, and stay up to date on changes in your profession.
6. Assume 100 percent responsibility for your actions and hold others accountable for their actions. This is central to developing an accountability system in your organization. Anytime something happens that doesn't work out well, always looks inside yourself first for the answers.
7. Allow for mistakes, and even failure. It’s important to develop a climate where taking a risk is accepted. Sometimes this means failing, but failure is an excellent teacher.
8. Work “smart” hours, not just long hours. It's not the number of hours that you put in but the way you work that will determine your productivity and success. Use all the tools at your disposal.
9. Always be honest. This is critical to building credibility with your staff and board. Always tell the truth.
10. Attitude is infectious. You are the role model and being positive and optimistic is critical to the success of the organization.

Most Managers Think of Themselves as Coaches

As a manager, do you think of yourself as a leader or as a coach? Do you, for instance, feel it’s important that your staff see you as an expert or do you prefer to create an egalitarian environment? Are you the person who solves problems or helps your staff come up with their own solutions? Are you more comfortable being directive or collaborative?

Results of a survey we’ve been conducting indicate a stronger desire to display coaching attributes than we were expecting.

Our assessment consists of 30 items we have tested and correlated to the most important attributes associated either with strong, top-down leadership or excellent coaches.  (If you have not yet, we encourage you to take the assessment now, so that you can compare your scores with the those we present below.)

More than 2,00o readers responded to the survey. The results represent a global audience with 60% of respondents from the U.S., 10% from Europe, 9% from Asia, 6% from Canada, 2% from Central/South America, 2% from Africa, and 11% who did not identify their location.  Respondents represent a fairly even mix of all levels in the organization: 20% executive management, 23% senior management, 27% middle management, and 30% supervisors or individual contributors.

You can compare your scores to others in the chart below here, which displays ranges of scores we’ve so far collected for the three different attributes. A negative score indicates a preference strong, direct leadership, managing through applying your expertise and through giving advice and clear direction. A positive score indicates a greater desire to act as a coach. Generally speaking, we have found through our research and our experience, excellent coaches would rather help others discover an answer for themselves than give advice. They prefer to act collaboratively rather than tell people what to do. And they prefer to act as an equal rather than as an expert.  And as we analyzed the data, we were surprised (and frankly, pleased) to see that three-quarters of scores were positive, indicating that the vast majority preferred to manage through coaching.

Years ago, Joe recalls sitting through an introduction by the CEO of a Fortune 50 company that had grown dramatically by acquisition. In his presentation, he said, “The reason we bought all these different companies was that we felt like they would be worth more together than they would running as separate entities. The only way we get that value is through your efforts to collaborate and work together.”  Most of the CEOs across the world have given that same speech. Apparently, people are hearing the message.

Well, perhaps. What we’ve tracked here are people’s desire to act in a particular way, not what they actually do. We imagine many readers are saying to themselves, “My boss does not seem that interested in letting me discover my own solutions.”  Or many could be musing, “It’s true that sometimes we desire an open, collaborative conversation only to find ourselves barking out directions and orders.” That can happen, but there’s a world of difference between organizations in which people fall short of a collaborative ideal and those that don’t subscribe to it at all.

As we looked further into the results, we found those in top management positions to have the strongest desire to be more collaborative and help others find their own solutions; supervisors ranked the lowest. That jibes with our own experience, in which we find supervisors often believe that they are expected to give advice, give orders, and assure that orders are executed. But, remarkably, even this group prefers coaching to directive leadership to some degree.

 We find these results so heartening because, frankly, we’ve seen supervisors and managers who were really good at getting results by giving lots of direction and advice and staying on top of all the details.  A really effective autocratic leader can be efficient and quick about getting things done. But something suffers in the process.  People wait for orders.  They stop taking initiative.  Their level of engagement declines slowly—and often rapidly—as time progresses.  It can be easy in the effort to get the job done to lose sight of the long-term goal of helping people get better at getting the job done. The enormous value of coaching is what it does to develop people and create an ever more engaged and empowered team of employees.

Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman

Jack Zenger is the CEO and Joseph Folkman is the president of Zenger/Folkman, a leadership development consultancy. They are co-authors of the October 2011 HBR article “Making Yourself Indispensable,” and the book How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths (McGraw-Hill, 2012).

HBR Blog Network

Senior Managers Won’t Always Get Along

It’s virtually impossible to like everyone you meet. It’s even more unlikely that you will get along with everyone at work. People have different personalities, biases, values, ambitions, and interests, all of which affect the chemistry of their relationships. And if you throw in the pressures of the workplace, it’s hardly surprising that tensions arise between colleagues and co-workers. But when members of a senior management team don’t get along, the negative impacts can cascade through an organization. Those conflicts have the potential to reduce productivity and morale for dozens or hundreds of people.
Let’s look at a two (disguised, but real) examples:

• In a manufacturing organization, three members of the senior team were told that they were on the short-list to become the next CEO. The ensuing competition exacerbated already strained relationships between them, such that they barely talked with each other outside of formal meetings. Taking cues from their bosses, the people that worked for them began to form “camps” and reduced their levels of cross-functional discussion and collaboration as well.

• In a financial services firm with a history of fairly autonomous business units, one senior manager was charged with creating a common approach to product development. After several of the business leaders pushed back on the standardized approach, she wrote them off and thereafter only worked with friendly and receptive areas.

It would be easy to say in both of these cases that the CEO should have intervened and forced people to work together more effectively. The reality is that in many organizations the CEO is either unaware of these dynamics, doesn’t know what to do, or chooses to ignore them, thinking that senior managers should be able to work these things out on their own. In other cases, like the first example here, the CEO might even foster the competition, almost like a lab experiment to see what happens.

So what can you do if you are part of a “frosty” management team, either as a direct contributor to the tension, or an observer of the dysfunction? Here are two suggestions:

First, get the issues out from under the rocks and into the light of day. Few things cripple a management team more than having elephants in the room — and in the organization — that no one acknowledges. Get beyond the conspiracy of silence by talking to the key parties, either individually, in small groups, or as a team, about what’s going on. This needs to be done delicately and sensitively, without blaming anyone or pointing fingers (which could make things worse), but the conversations need to get started with a goal of making the business better.

In the case of the competing executives cited above, for example, one of the managers initiated a lunch meeting for the three of them — and explicitly talked about the awkwardness of the situation and how it was affecting other people on their team and in the company. All three then agreed that, while the situation was not optimal, they should do everything possible to do what’s best for the company and not just their own ambitions — and they conveyed this to their teams. Although this didn’t end the tensions, it certainly made it easier to keep doing business until a new CEO was selected.

The second way to deal with situations like these is to gently force the contending people to work together on projects or issues that are important to the company. In other words, when senior managers need to put on “bigger hats,” it helps them to transcend the interpersonal rivalries and dislikes in order to achieve the broader objective. For example, in the financial services company mentioned earlier, the HR executive, concerned about the deteriorating relationships, quietly influenced the CEO to tackle a key strategic issue by setting up a few small cross-functional teams — and made sure that the executives who were not getting along were paired up.

There is nothing that says that members of a leadership team need to like each other. They do need to realize however that when they don’t “get along” their dysfunctional relationships can reverberate throughout the organization. Preventing this from happening is a responsibility of the whole team.

By: Ron Ashkenas
HBR Blog Network

Why Managers and HR Don’t Get Along

By Ron Ashkenas

Have you ever noticed how ambivalent line managers are about the Human Resources function? On one hand, most of them want their HR people to be involved in key strategic decisions; on the other, they want to make sure that whatever they do is not perceived as an “HR program.” Managers often rely on their HR partners to help them build an effective team, but then chafe at them for forcing them to “follow the process.” The bottom line, as Ram Charan argued in his recent HBR article, is that many line managers are disappointed in their HR people.

While there may be many factors influencing their complex relationship, these three stand out:
First is the confusion about the role that HR is playing at any one time. As Dave Ulrich pointed out almost 20 years ago in his classic book, “Human Resource Champions,” there are actually four roles played by HR people: administrative expert, employee advocate, strategic business partner, and change agent. In some cases, an HR person specializes in just one of these roles (e.g. the manager of an HR call center is basically focusing on the administrative role). Many other HR professionals however, particularly generalists, switch back and forth between the roles, and when they (and their management partners) are not explicit about which role is being played, it creates misunderstandings.

For example, an HR person who was helping a team streamline a number of key planning activities switched the discussion from process mapping to employee performance assessment. The managers were puzzled and frustrated by the shift, because they felt that they were making progress and that HR was all of a sudden slowing them down. But the HR person was simply concerned about whether the team’s actions would eliminate some positions and wanted to make sure it was handled in a fair and equitable way. She had shifted her role from “change agent” to “employee advocate,” but because she had not been explicit about putting on a different hat, the rest of the team grew upset at the sudden change of direction. Unfortunately this happens all too often, particularly with HR generalists who play multiple roles. When it isn’t clear which role is being played at a particular time and why, managers become confused and then blame HR for not providing effective support.

Second, many managers don’t fully accept their own accountability for managing human capital, and instead want HR people to “take care of it” for them. They avoid or delay activities such as candidate interviews, performance assessments, employee feedback discussions, compensation reviews, responses to engagement surveys, and a host of others. Often this avoidance is based on a lack of time, skills, or interest – or anxiety about getting into tough interpersonal territory. No matter the reason, it leaves HR people acting like the process police and chasing after recalcitrant line managers, which does very little to enhance the relationship.
Finally, all too many HR people don’t take the time to truly understand their company’s business and the pressures facing its managers. It’s surprising how many HR people can’t explain their firm’s business model, competitive industry context, or critical product issues – much less be conversant with the key financial metrics. As Ram Charan noted, very few organizations encourage rotation between HR and line business roles; as a result, most HR people become functional or technical experts and miss out on the nuances (or basics) of the business. In the absence of this understanding, it’s often difficult for HR people to contextualize the critical human capital processes for managers, who then don’t know how to prioritize them.
The good news about these issues is that they are not impossible to resolve – although as in any two-way relationship, both sides have to join in the dance. Line managers have to accept that human capital management is a major part of their job that can’t be delegated or deferred; and HR professionals have to better understand the business and appreciate the performance challenges facing line managers. In addition, both parties need to be more explicit about what role HR needs to play at any given time.

Obviously this won’t happen overnight, but there are some easy steps that both sides can take to get started. For example, if you’re an HR manager, make a point of spending more time with business people and less with your HR counterparts. Don’t talk to them about HR, but about what they are doing in their jobs, their concerns, and their aspirations. If you’re a line manager, make sure that your colleagues in HR are engaged in your business reviews and encouraged to contribute, not just about human capital issues, but also about business decisions. If you keep asking, you might actually get some fresh perspectives.

Ron Ashkenas

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting. He is a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

HBR Blog Network

End Abusive Behavior on Your Team

By: Liane Davey

Managers aim their abuse at those who are least likely to defend themselves. That is the finding of a disturbing new study by Pedro Neves (published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology), which looked at 193 supervisor/employee pairings in a variety of different industries.

I found the results troubling, but sadly they resonated based on my experience as an executive team advisor in dozens of organizations.

Here is a summary of Neves’ findings.

Employees with poor core-self evaluations (an aggregate measure related to self-esteem and sense of control) and poor coworker support were more likely to experience aggressive behavior from their supervisor (belittling, blaming, etc.). That is, the weakest employees receive the brunt of a bad manager’s abuse.

The propensity to target aggression at the people least likely to retaliate was exacerbated when the supervisor was in a stressful or threatening situation (in this case post-downsizing). Supervisors under stress did not become universally more aggressive, just more aggressive toward the weakest members of their teams.

Employees with low core self-evaluations did not respond to the abuse directly. Instead, they decreased their effort on their job duties and reduced their discretionary effort on other tasks that support the team or the organization.

In these findings, I immediately recognized a pattern of team dysfunction that I described in my book You First and that I wrote about in a previous post for HBR. This toxic dynamic is created and worsened by three distinct roles: the wicked manager who is preying upon the weak, the wounded victim who fails to defend him- or herself, and the witnesses who do nothing to interrupt the unhealthy interaction. Anyone playing any of these roles can change the team by changing their behavior.

If You Are the Manager

First, if you are a manager, hold up a mirror and ask yourself whether you play into this destructive dynamic. If you are honest with yourself, do you take out your frustrations on the person on your team who is least likely to fight back? Is there someone on your team caught in a vicious cycle where his victim mentality has become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Just making yourself aware of this will start to change it for the better. Then, decide what to do. Is there is a constructive way to address the things that are frustrating you so that you don’t pass your emotion on to the team? Even being aware that your frustrations come from outside your team will help. If you have angst that comes from uncertainty about your own situation, don’t take it out on your subordinates, try to address it directly by asking for clarity from your manager. If you’re angry about a decision from above, find an appropriate outlet to express your concerns so they don’t get projected onto the team.

Next, make a decision about the weak team member. There is no point having a helpless person on your team. If it’s not worth the investment to turn his behavior around, find another home for him or exit him from the organization. If the person has a unique skillset or important relationships with customers, it might be worth the investment to help them succeed. Invest in building the person’s confidence and increasing his credibility with his teammates.

Your negative words and body language toward the weak team member have demonstrated to his coworkers that they don’t need to respect or support him. If you pay attention to your own behavior, you’ll probably notice that you don’t make much eye contact with him and that your body is usually aimed away. Start shifting those subtle cues while you also focus on being inviting and open in how you interact with him.

If You Are the Victim
If you’re the victim of the abusive manager, stand up for yourself. Your attempts to grin and bear it without pushing back are inviting more aggression. First, you need to realize that your boss’ behavior is likely being triggered by stress she is under (i.e., it’s about something other than you). When you present an easy target, she gets a chance to let off some steam at your expense.

Let your manager know that you will not be a punching bag anymore. Say something strong and respectful such as “I think we can resolve this without raising voices,” or “My report had each of the pieces that we discussed when we met on Tuesday.” Where it makes sense, enlist the support of your coworkers “Brad, could you weigh in on this, we talked through this approach.”
Finally, don’t get even by reducing your efforts on the job. It may feel unfair and you may feel disengaged, but the last thing you want to do is give your manager a valid basis for her treatment of you. Every time you feel the desire to switch off your computer a little early, channel that into a productive conversation or an important project.

If You Are the Witness

If you observe this kind of destructive relationship between your boss and one of your teammates, get off the sidelines and do something. Watching silently as a coworker is abused is no better than standing idle as a kid is bullied on a playground. Remember, the research showed that the supervisor abuse was much more likely to be targeted at people who didn’t have the support of their coworkers.

Reach out to your teammate and provide support, advice, and coaching. If there are things you believe she can do to come across as more confident, pass along your ideas. In meetings, if you see abusive behavior, try to defuse it. For example, if someone continually interrupts her, ask that people hear her out. You might try something like: “I’d like to hear what Sally has to say.” If the boss criticizes her, be vocal when you disagree. Lending some of your confidence and credibility might be the boost she needs to reclaim some respect from the team and the boss.

Any one person can disrupt an unhealthy dynamic by behaving in a new way. It takes the willingness to see and acknowledge the bad behavior and the courage to do something differently. It’s worth it.

Liane Davey

Liane Davey is the vice president of team solutions at Knightsbridge Human Capital. Her new book is You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done. She is also a co-author of Leadership Solutions: The Pathway to Bridge the Leadership Gap. Follow her on Twitter at @LianeDavey.

5 Things You Need to Stop Doing to Your Employees Right Now

BY Suzanne Lucas

 Just because you can treat your employees poorly doesn't mean you should.

You're the boss. It's your business, so you can do what you want, right? Well, technically, yes, as long as it's not violating any laws. But just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should do something. Here are 5 things you need to stop doing, even though they are legal.

1. Conducting the background check after bringing someone on board. This seems to be more and more popular. Don't bother about that pesky paperwork; just get someone started. After all, time is money, right? In the past week, I've received two emails from people who accepted new jobs, started those new jobs, and then got fired within the week because they didn't pass the reference check. Talk about wasting time and money. You do have to pay those people for working, so no money saved.

2. Forcing people to resign. You may think you're being nice in giving an employee the option to resign, by demanding that she write a resignation letter. Just stop it. If the person deserves to be fired for cause, fire her. If it's a layoff, or a generic poor-performance termination, or you just don't like the person, you can give the option of resigning, but honestly, just terminate the person, and don't fight unemployment. Recruiters don't look fondly on people who resigned without a new job lined up anyway. You're not helping, and you're a cheapskate who is trying to get out of a bump in unemployment costs.

3. Paying new hires significantly more than your long-term, loyal staff. It's totally true that it's easier to keep an employee than it is to coax someone to leave a job and come to work for you. And it's also true that market rates change, and that it's not required that you have all staff members doing the same job making exactly the same amount of money. After all, people bring different skills and experiences and expertise. However, when you need to offer the new guy $10,000 more than your loyal, long-term, hard-working, high performer is making, that's a sign that you should give your long-term employee a big raise. Don't treat current staff poorly because you can.

4. Giving false performance appraisals. I don't mean that you're forging or plagiarizing performance appraisals (although using the copy-paste method in which all your employees get the same "feedback" needs to stop as well). I mean reviews in which you rate someone highly and tell the person she's doing great, and then three months later, you want to fire her and blame "performance." Someone who was a star three months previously deserves help. If you want to fire her so that you can hire your cousin, say that. If you want to fire her because you've hired a new manager who hates this person, consider why on earth you are getting rid of a trusted employee over a new person who has the maturity of a seventh grader. If it truly is a performance issue, why did you say your employee was doing great a few months ago? Be honest. Always.

5. Refusing to give copies of documents. If you stand behind what you've said in that writeup of your employee, why won't you give the employee a copy of the document? If you demand a signature "right now!" when the employee says she would like to talk to her attorney first, you are a sleazy, slimy boss. If the document won't stand up to legal scrutiny, you shouldn't be asking for a signature.

Source: www.inc.com

Managers must make a difference – otherwise why keep them?

Thanks to the information revolution, we can all self-manage. If managers aren't doing anything for your company, let them go.

Have you ever looked across the office at your manager and thought, "what exactly do they do?" You're not alone. Pretty much everybody at work wonders what their manager does and that also includes your manager. They look across with x-ray eyes through the partition wall and they too wonder what their manager does. Without wishing to be too radical I'd like to politely suggest that all management is scrapped. Or, to use one of their favourite phrases, let go.
If this were to happen tomorrow would we have a headless chicken, a driverless train or an efficient beehive? Well in the first few days we'd have a train wreck of headless chickens stirring up a hornets' nest, but then things would settle down. Why? Because most people are now self-managing. When you work from home do you have your boss in the spare room to make sure you're OK? No, you don't. Technology and empowerment have liberated us from the traditional hierarchy.

Hierarchical business models have been breaking down for a long time. The pyramid should have been flattening out, yet for some reason the apex and base are now much further apart, ending up looking a bit like the Shard. Whatever you think of the building, it's an ugly business model and not really sustainable. There are three words that explain how damaging the shard model can be: Goodwin, Fred, and Sir.

The alternative model to the pyramid is also taken from ancient history; it's called the tablet. Traditionally, managers ran things because they knew more than you did. Information was power. But technology has democratised information. You can now have all the information about business at your fingertips while you're in bed. Information transparency is the enemy of hierarchy. So, knowing you've got the same information they have, take a long look at your boss and ask yourself if they are really better qualified to make decisions than you. After all, they are now detached from the frontline. They are no longer serving the customer. They are no longer producing or creating value. What they know about the frontline is probably out of date, out of touch, irrelevant and quite possibly dangerous. So why don't we just bin them all?

Defenestrating managers all sounds rather exciting and revolutionary but there's one big hairy fly in the ointment. And that is money. Increasingly, the difference between you and your boss is that they have a bigger budget than you. As you go up the business ladder you'll find that your time is increasingly taken up with two things: law and finance. Money still talks and your manager will translate for you.

One of the truly irritating things about our new sense of empowerment is that everything you have been empowered to do, you boss is empowered to undo. Real empowerment is about being able to make all the decisions that count and keeping them made. Naturally you'll make them with all the other people that have something useful to say, but that's what technology is for. But you also need the purse strings and then you can truly self-manage.

But hold on. What about wise heads? What about experience, maturity, acquired knowledge? Surely we don't want to throw all these away? Clearly not, but do we want to value them above innovation, creativity, daring and outrageous optimism? In business the half-life of useful experience has never been shorter. Experience is often the enemy of progress. This isn't a generational thing either, it's a state of mind thing. You're either open to continual shifting complexity and fluid new connections or you're more interested in building something safe and solid and permanent (which nothing really is).

Everyone should be valued for the difference they make, however they make it. We want managers to make a difference, too. In your business, whatever it is, if managers don't make a difference, don't make a manager. If you already have one and don't really like it, then comfort yourself with this essential truth about old-style managers: they can't manage without you.

Source : The Guardian

5 Powerful Notes to Write That Will Change Your Life BY Jeff Haden

 How? When you give, you also receive.

Phone calls are great. But when you want to say something important, writing a note, especially a handwritten note, can be even more powerful.

Why? Notes are unexpected. (Who writes letters anymore?) Notes can be savored. Notes can be saved. Notes can be pulled out and reread dozens of times.

The memories of phone calls can be fleeting. Notes--meaningful, sincere, genuine expressions of thanks, of praise, of feelings--can last forever.

Here are five notes you should write today:

1. Write a thank-you to someone who believed in you. Belief is a powerful thing. Some people have incredible stores of self-belief, but most of us are given confidence and self-assurance by others. Slowly but surely, through their encouragement and support, we develop a stronger sense of self.

At some point, someone saw you struggling and gave you hope. At some point, someone saw something in you that you didn't yet see in yourself. Who you are today is a direct result of that person's faith in you.

Belief, founded or unfounded, is incredibly powerful--and when someone else believes in us, it's unforgettable.

Tell someone what a huge difference he or she made in your life. Reading your note will make a huge difference in that person's life--and in your relationship.

2. Write an apology to a person you let down. We've all made mistakes. We've all done things we regret. Or we haven't done things--and we regret not acting. We've all failed to step up, or step in, or show support, or lend an ear or shoulder...

Maybe you feel you've moved past it. Maybe you feel the other person has moved past it, too. Maybe you're dreaming.

An apology not made is the elephant in a room. No matter how much time has passed, it still colors every subsequent interaction. Kill the elephant. Say you're sorry.

Just don't follow your apology with a disclaimer. Don't say, "I'm sorry, but I was really mad because you…" or "I'm sorry I blew up at you, but I do think you were out of line, too."
Don't say anything that in any way places even the smallest amount of blame on the other person. Say you're sorry, say why you're sorry, and take all the blame. No less. No more. The elephant may never totally disappear, but once you apologize, sincerely and genuinely, the elephant will no longer matter--to either of you.

3. Write a note of congratulations. You don't even have to know the person. If you liked a book, contact the author and say, "I loved your book." If a local entrepreneur landed a major customer, send a note and say, "I realize you don't know me, but I was so impressed I just had to congratulate you!"

Just make sure you don't follow your congratulations with some sort of request. (Unfortunately, that's the oldest trick in the networking book.)

Bonus points if you explain the impact the person's accomplishment had on you. Maybe it motivated you. Maybe it inspired you. Maybe it changed your life in some small way. If so, say so. Then you're not only congratulating people for a job well done--you're letting them know they made an impact in someone else's life.

You're letting them know they matter. They'll feel a little better about themselves--and you'll feel better about yourself, too.

4. Write an offer to help. Many people hesitate to ask for help. They see admitting they need help as the same as admitting a weakness. In a hard-charging, Type-A world, who willingly shows vulnerability?

But everyone--everyone--needs help. So offer to help. But don't just say, "Is there anything I can help you with?" That won't work: We're trained to say, "No, I'm fine."

Be specific. Find something you can help with. Say, "I know you're working on that. Can I help you finish?" Or say, "I've always wanted to know more about this. Can I help you work on it?"
Offer in a way that feels collaborative, not patronizing or gratuitous. If you want, make it a "redeemable coupon" that entitles the recipient to take you up on a specific offer. Offer in the right spirit and people--especially people who might be struggling--will jump at a chance to draw on your energy, enthusiasm, and talent.

And in the process, you'll strengthen a bond and make a better friend.

5. Write an unexpected compliment. Every day, people around you do good things. Most of those people don't work with or for you; in fact, most of them have no relationship with you, professional or personal. Compliment one of them for something for which it's least expected.
Write a note to a doctor who helped you through a rough time. Write a note to a college professor who made you see the world in a different way. Write a note to your town praising the snowplow crews. Write a note to someone who did something thoughtful not because it was expected but simply because they could.

Expected feels good. Unexpected makes a huge, and lasting, impact.
And the note you write may be displayed for a long time, serving as a reminder that every job, no matter how seemingly thankless or invisible, is appreciated by at least one person.

You.

And that's an awesome way to be remembered.

Source : www.inc.com

5 Things Smart Managers Know About Building Teams

BY Eric V. Holtzclaw

Few managers know how to build truly functional teams. 5 tactics to perfect the skill.

In order for your company to prosper, you must figure out how to build a team that works well together. That can be a difficult task.  After all, creating a team means bringing together people with different skillsets and varied personalities to work towards a common goal--a complex undertaking.
When I look at the tactics smart managers implement, I see five common threads to how they approach team-building:

1. Play to Individual Strengths

You need to understand what each individual member's strengths are and put each person in a place to shine.

It is very rare that an employee can improve upon a deficiency, especially if that deficiency is a part of their nature. If a team member isn't good at details, they will never be good at details. You need to decide if they do the rest of their job well and if so, partner them with someone else who can help shore up their deficiency.

I hired an account manager who was excellent with customers--especially our more difficult customers--but she was not good at details. I partnered her with another team member for one final review of the documents she produced before they were sent out.

2. Encourage Transparency

Teams are a lot like families, and you need to let them work things out on their own.  When things start to go awry, bring together those who aren't getting along and make them work through their concerns. Don't let them put you in the middle of a he said/she said situation. Your primary job is to help team members understand each other better.

This approach will feel uncomfortable, but if they learn that your go-to strategy is to bring them together to work it out, they will start trying that on their own and will only involve you when absolutely necessary.

3. Establish Ground Rules 

Your team needs to know how you like to operate. I'm a solution oriented manager. I am fine with talking about problems with a project or an approach, but I insist that everyone contribute ideas for resolution.

When issues arise, and they will, I don't want to get caught up in whose fault it is, or why it happened. I prefer to take time to do that at an established and appropriate time later. I am known to say, "Don't bring me a problem without a solution" and, "I don't want to know why we can't do it, I want to focus on how we can."

Other managers prefer to do root cause analysis immediately and then move forward from that point with a solution. Everyone's style is different, and it is often based on the type of work you do.  The important thing is that your team knows your preferred work style so everyone is thinking toward that same goal.

4. Let Them Know You Have Their Back

As the leader of a team, your team members must know that you have their back and that you are their greatest supporter.  I see my primary job to remove obstacles that are in my team's way and to be there to support them when issues arise with a customer or other internal groups.  When you team members know they have your unconditional support, they can move forward with confidence.

5. Provide an Incentive

Create a goal that your team can work towards--a day off at the end of the quarter, flexibility in their work schedule, or a bonus.  Realize that just as your team members have different skills, they probably respond to different incentives, so rotating through the types of incentives you provide or allowing for flexibility is key to the success of an incentive.

I always have team members who prefer time off or an experience over money.  A bonus program, while nice, doesn't have the same impact as providing an extra day off or a gift certificate to a nice restaurant. It comes back to knowing that everyone's different.