Management Blog

Tips & advice to help you improve your performance

Make Personal Mastery Your Goal

Don’t think that Excel is just a spreadsheet. To excel at something is a pinnacle of achievement. Personal mastery begins with a vision of what you want to achieve in your life or at work. Some of us may have goals and objectives, but these…

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Become a First-Class Conversationalist

Meeting and talking with others is an excellent way of honing your thinking skills and becoming a person that others seek out for advice and information. So here are some ideas when we want to improve our hit rate when conversing with someone. (more…)

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4 Levels of Employee Engagement

Ever despaired at your team members’ lack of engagement at work? Ever wondered whether your key employees leave their brains at the office door when they come in and put them back in when they leave? You’re not the only one! Many managers wonder how…

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A Wake-Up Call For Businesses

The Headline in the New York Times read as follows: Why I am leaving Goldman-Sachs Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. (more…)

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How the Expectancy Theory of Motivation Really Works

Expectancy theory suggests that motivation is based on how much we want something and how likely we think we are to get it. I often discuss this facet of motivation when coaching managers, as it answers many questions about desire, want and need for extrinsic…

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Ineffective Managers – Now We Know Why

So…the secret is out. According to the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), almost half of managers believe their own bosses are ineffective. Of course, it depends on who you ask and what their current state is, but the UK survey of 4,500 managers showed that 43% described…

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Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

We all know that planning is essential in order to achieve overall organisational and departmental goals, but many plans I see when dealing with management development are, quite frankly, not worth the cigarette packet they are written on. So how do you make sure that,…

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Conducting a Team Self-Evaluation

Many teams are actually just a group of people who happen to be working under the same roof. They may have similar jobs, work for the same company and aim for similar results, but are they all pulling in the same direction, meeting the same…

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How To Effectively Deal With Confrontation

Of all the skills managers want to have improved, communication pretty much comes up there at the top. Along with negotiating a higher salary, of course! But communication is such a broad subject. I often ask clients, ‘If there was one area of communication you…

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How To Encourage Learning and Development

Many companies have cut back on their training budgets in today’s economic climate, as they put their attention on surviving and ensuring every penny is well-invested. But this doesn’t mean they have to neglect the development and progress of their people. In fact, if you…

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How Management and Leadership Have Changed

Boy, how times have changed! We were discussing the Sinclair C5 in the office this week and many here had never even heard of it, let alone seen one! Launched during a by-gone age (1985!), it became an object of media and popular ridicule during…

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How Do I Manage Someone Who Is More Knowledgeable Than Me?

We had an interesting question this week on our management course that opened up a good discussion on leadership. The question came from a new manager who had been promoted from among his peers and was now managing people who were much more knowledgeable and…

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