When the crisis hits, it’s human nature for leadership to turn inward and start scrambling. How can we pivot? How can we make payroll? What’s going to happen to my business? My family? Will we even survive? The weight of not just being the support for your family but for all the families under your… Read more »
Management
What To Do When Your Boss Can’t Manage
Speaking engagements are such a fun opportunity to gather intelligence on what’s going on in the practice of management. While Bellrock focuses on small business, seminars allow us to access a much broader audience of professionals. A version of this question came up three times in three weeks at various seminars in Vancouver: “My boss… Read more »
Promoted to Manager? Some Lifesaving Tips for Managing Your Peers
In the first class of our management training programs, we ask what each participant’s goals are. How to manage time, how to delegate, how to motivate, and how to develop employees are common requests. But the lucky few slated for promotion also ask, “How do I manage my peers? I used to be their co-worker… Read more »
I Can’t Get Any Work Done At Work!
The open office design movement was intended to increase and improve collaboration. Evidence suggests that it has had the opposite effect. People are increasingly hiding behind their noise-cancelling headphones to concentrate. When we hear, “I go in early so I can get some work done before everyone shows up,” we know something’s gone awry with… Read more »
The Problem With “Constructive” Feedback
The traditional annual performance evaluation system has recently come under attack, particularly because of its ineffectiveness in helping develop great performance. A once-a-year snapshot forced down the throats of managers that doesn’t develop excellence? Shocking! 🙄 The research suggests that more frequent feedback provides better results. But what separates the inspired manager from the mediocre… Read more »
The Employee Development Path
Directing to Delegating A planned approach to employee development is the most effective way to get things off your plate and onto your team’s. Yet some managers only think of delegating when their work is spilling off their plate and they see no other option but to hand it off. While a more measured approach… Read more »
Bookkeeper, Controller, or CFO?
What Position Do You Need? When starting a business, the leader or a family member often “handles the books” given the sensitive nature of the information and the minimal time required for this task when a company has few transactions to process. While the leader sees this work as mostly administrative, the value of the… Read more »
How to Craft Outstanding Interview Questions
One of the first steps in crafting good interview questions is knowing what you are looking for in a candidate and, of course, this is different for every company and every position. To illustrate how to craft great questions, we’ll assume one of the strengths we want to assess is the candidate’s problem-solving ability. Use… Read more »
The Onboarding Process
The goal of an employee onboarding process is to improve company productivity by quickly increasing a new employee’s effectiveness. The process begins the day the offer of employment is accepted and lasts until the end of the 90-day probationary period. Once the offer has been accepted, it becomes the manager’s job to ensure that the… Read more »
Effective One-on-One Meetings (not an oxymoron)
One-on-one meetings are held between a manager and direct report with the objectives of setting priorities, gaining clarity around progress, and improving performance. The value of the meeting should be, at a minimum, equal to the cost of the time spent in the meeting.