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Being bullied at work is horrible. Bullying saps confidence, your focus on work, your time, and your motivation. Even worse is not doing anything. This give a bully free reign which is likely to mean the bullying continues or gets worse. This will not help your happiness, nor your motivation nor performance at work.

 You will learn 7 steps to tackle bullying at work, to give you confidence and knowledge of what steps you can and should take.

 Just check that you are the victim of workplace bullying rather than honest mistakes. Bullying at work is the repeated behaviour intended to hurt or control you. If you are being bullied the actions to stop bullying at work include:

 The first step to tackle bullying at work is to check your company policy so you know what processes the company should follow and what protections you are entitled to.

 The second set of actions to tackle bullying at work is to gather examples and evidence. This is crucial to how to stop bullying in the workplace. Bullying behaviour is usually subtle (68% of cases) so being able to demonstrate a clear pattern of bullying behaviour is super important.

 The next step in how to deal with a bully at work is to have an informal conversation. Book a meeting room and invite the bully to meet with you. Showing a bully that you are not going to accept the bullying tactics is a good way to get them to stop. 

 The fourth step to tackle bullying at work is to speak to your manager. Your manager should be a great source of help and support, plus they have greater power and influence within the business and can bring this to bear in stopping bullying in the workplace. 

 Fifth, in how to deal with a bully at work – find allies. Those at or above the level of the bully can be very useful allies. Multiple people pressurising a bully to stop has more impact that one. 

 If these steps have not yet worked, escalate the bullying situation to HR and to Senior Management. This takes how to deal with a bully at work to a much more formal setting, increasing the pressure on the bully to stop.

Finally, you can escalate the bullying at work externally to lawyers and tribunals. This is usually a final stage and can be needed if your manager is the bully.

 If a manager is the bully, which accounts for more than half the bullying cases in the workplace, then these steps still work. Build stronger evidence and work harder at finding allies to help negate a manager’s great influence and power within an organisation.

Good luck!

Knowing how to spot bullying on your team as a manager is super useful. Bullying is very damaging to team motivation and performance. 

 Bullying is very tough for those on the receiving end of being bullying behaviour. Not doing anything about bullying – through ignorance, not knowing what to do or being unwilling to act – is very damaging to your reputation and standing as a manager.

 Many signs of a bully at work are subtle and therefore hard to spot. This makes the job of spotting bullying in the workplace a lot harder. Identifying workplace bullying is even harder because may other issues can produce similar symptoms in employees being bullied.  

 How to spot bullying as a manager is a crucial first step. To help you, this video takes you through 5 symptom behaviours of employees being bullied, and 17 tactics used by those bullying at work.

 One of the most critical things to do for how to spot bullying in the workplace is to make the time to observe what is happening around you and check to make sure there are no signs of workplace bullying.

 Once you have spotted signs of bullying at work and investigated, then knowing how to deal with bullying at work is the next step. It is super important to take action as quickly as possible. 

 At the end of this video, I take you through a few tips on how to tackle bullying in the workplace. 

 Bullying is a horrible thing to have to suffer at any point in your life. Make it as hard as possible for bullies to successfully bully other team members.

 Unfortunately, many bullies at work are managers. Managers hold positions of responsibility and have more power and influence within the business as a result. It is easier for them to overstep the mark and engage in bullying behaviour. 

 Keep an eye on your team members to make sure that they are not being bullied by other managers in the business. Having regularly one-on-one meetings gives you a great platform to discuss these types of issues and demonstrate your support for them. 

 Do your best to stop bullying in the workplace. 

When you manage older team members it can be pretty nerve racking and intimidating especially if there is a large age gap. You might be a new manager or have a new team to manage when you first manage older workers. 

 Your confidence in yourself and your ability to treat older employees in exactly the same way as you treat younger team members is really important. Confidence makes a huge difference to you and to older team members.

 When managing anyone – younger or older – relationships matter. When the age gap is large, building trusting relationships is harder so you have to put a little more effort in. 

 Get to know your older workers. Find out what they like, what challenges they have with their job, what their ambitions are – just like you would with all the other team members. Build good trusting relationships. 

 Secondly, it is so important to treat everyone equally. Make consistent decisions and take consistent actions. Do this and the older team members won’t worry that they are being treated differently or worse. 

 Third, when leading older employees, remind yourself of the value you bring to the team. Managing older employees is great because they have depth and possible breadth of experience that you can draw on. Don’t forget that you have different skills and experience that they do. You are manager of the team for a reason. Demonstrate what you bring in a natural and relaxed way. Be confident of the value you bring. 

 Fourth, keep an open mind and respect the differences. Don’t assume when managing older employees that they don’t have good energy levels or they don’t have a desire to learn. Find out what each individual wants by asking lots of questions and paying attention to what they tell you. Keep an open mind. 

 Also be respectful that everyone is at a different point in their lives, with different ambitions, interests, and motivations. Work with the team members you have so that you can get the best out of the team.

 Fifth, when you manage older employees than you, look to leverage older team members’ experience and knowledge. They should have depth and / or breadth to their experience. The old employees should have seen plenty – what has been tried and not worked for instance. Use this knowledge and experience in how to manage older employees.

 The workforce is continuing to age. The fastest growing age group in the workplace is the over 65s. When you manage older team members you have access to great knowledge and experience – make the absolute best use of this. 

 Enjoy having older team members in your team!

Working out how to manage lazy team members and taking the right action to reduce or remove the issue is a challenge most managers’ dread.

 If you ignore lazy employees at work, laziness has a way of spreading into the rest of the team. Taking action quickly is a must.

 I am sharing 6 tried and tested ways to deal with lazy employees so you can deal with lazy team members effectively and fairly.

 When you are managing lazy employees, the first action is not to ignore the lazy behaviour. If you do, you are sending a message to the lazy team member and the rest of your team that being lazy is okay. Then laziness starts spreading through the team, and your management ability starts being questioned. 

 The second action to manage lazy team members is to find out why the employee is being lazy. There are lots of reasons, and once you understand why, then you can work out how to deal with lazy team members much more easily and successfully. Your approach should be tailored to the employee and the situation.

 When motivating lazy employees, setting expectations is really important. Add clear goals to be achieved, ideally agreed with lazy team member, so that both parties know when expectations have been met or exceeded. 

 Next when working out how to manage lazy employees in the workplace, listen to all their excuses as to why they are not delivering. Note them down and then go away and go your homework. Demonstrate that all the spurious excuses are not valid and work to remove the valid ones with training, resources, and mentoring.

 When managing lazy staff, providing honest feedback is very helpful to them and reinforces your expectations with them. To manage lazy employees monitor their improvements through tracking their measurable output. 

 Finally, after going through these ways to manage lazy team members and you are seeing limited or no improvement, take formal action with the lazy employee. Put them on a Performance Improvement Plan, involve HR and finally use the disciplinary process of your company.

 Don’t let lazy team members carry on being lazy. Take fair and corrective action quickly.

 Good luck!

Time management for managers is a real challenge. The demands on your time and workload only seem to increase. Time always seems to be against you.

 I have 5 ways for managers to gain more time plus share 8 time management techniques for managers. 

 As a manager you never have enough time and always want to get more done.

 So the first action to gain more time for managers is ruthlessly prioritise. Prioritise for you and your team members. Everyone tells you to prioritise. How to prioritise is the real challenge. 

 I share 8 different ways to prioritise covering how to manage your time and get more done.  These time management techniques are specifically aimed at managers, though can be used by all.

 The second time management technique is to delegate problems not tasks. Delegating problems means that you are asking others to do the solutioning and planning parts, rather than just asking them to do the tasks or activities to implement the plan. This saves you time and more importantly develops the problem solving and planning skills of your team.

 The third of five time management skills is to make meeting valuable or bin them. Everyone spends a lot of time in meetings, and managers particularly so. Per Forbes, around 50% of time spent in meetings is not used well. Therefore, make the meetings you control and influence as valuable as possible and I share ways of doing this. 

 The fourth of my time management tips is to encourage decision making across the team. Everyone makes decisions every day. Provide the right frameworks, confidence and support to ensure your team are making decisions (within their remit) rather than coming to you for you to make the decision. This will save you a lot of time and develop your team.

 The fifth of my ways to gain more time as a manager is to create more leaders in your team. Every team member can act as a leader, can practice leadership skills, regardless of their job title. Creating more leadership skills in the team through mentoring and coaching reduces the pressure and burden on you as their leader. It also saves you a lot of time and gives you great succession planning.

 Be Proactive. Take action to give yourself more time at work! 

How useful is Myers Briggs personality test? 2m people each year take the Myers Briggs test, usually as part of a team exercise. Do Myers Briggs really tell you anything useful?

 The personality test will be useful for some and a lot less useful for others depending on your own self-awareness. 

 A bit on Myers Briggs explained – the test has been around from the 1940’s, uses 90+ forces questions to give you a Myers Briggs personality type – one of 16 personality types. Each of the Myers Briggs types has associated characteristics. 

 In my view, the output is too high level to be very useful for personal development. It is still useful. Personality tests are a form of feedback. Most feedback is useful. The personality types are not that useful in themselves. The most useful is understanding how strong your preference pairs are.

 Using Myers Briggs type indicator test with your team helps you understand each individual person’s preferences. You also can see how balanced or not your team is, and what the mix of preference is. All can be useful in getting to know your team quicker and helping you adapt your management style to best suit your team and the individuals in your team. 

 If you are asking “What’s my personality type?”, Myers Briggs will give you an indication through this test specific lenses.

 Towards the end, I explain a bit about each of the Myers Briggs preference pairs which gives you the four letter label you often hear people quoting. Knowing how strong each of your preference pairs are will give you some insights into your preferences (or reconfirm what you are already aware of). 

 I think that Myers Briggs and other personality tests are useful to surface preferences and characteristics of yourself or your team that you were not fully aware of. This brings them into your conscious thought, which helps you adjust your communication and management style to best suit your audience. 

I hope you get some insights from taking Myers Briggs. 

Enhance.training

The impact of manager skill on team performance is huge in my view. I have been managed by some amazing managers and some terrible ones. 

 My motivation, my ability to get things done, my understanding of direction and host of other areas was massively different with the best skilled managers compared to the worst.

 Think about the cost to the business of lower manager skill – low motivation, lower output, lower trust, increased conflict, high turnover of staff … the list goes on. For a ten of 10, the costs of poor management skills can quickly pass 100,000. The cost of management training or coaching programmes is a fraction of the costs of doing nothing.

 Setting and maintaining direction and focus on goals is widely accepted as essential practice. Consider the difference between one manager communicating the direction and goals and then forgetting about them versus another manager constantly reminding the team and keeping them focused so they achieve the goals. Different levels of management skills - hugely different results.

 The impact of manager skill is felt with different management styles employed by managers. The highly skilled manager flex their management styles correctly. The less skilled managers use one or so in most situations. What is that style was micro-management, and they were managing highly skilled and ambitious team members?

 How quickly a manager deals with or removes blockages – poor processes, conflict, difficult team members etc is another key impact of manager skills. Manager skills development should include building skills and confidence in how to deal with all the people aspects of blockages. These are the trickiest and most stressful challenges for most managers. Formal training in this area is a must for developing management skills for new managers.

 The next impact of manager skill is on motivating and engaging employees. Both have a big impact on measurable performance of the team as many stats show. Improving management skills in this area pays gives you and the business large benefits and many techniques can start to work quickly. 

 Finally, if you improve management skills around being able to protect the team and manage the impact of politics on what you are team works on, this will help you and the team hit your main goals. 

 The impact of management skills on team performance is huge. Invest the time and effort to keep improving your management skills.

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Having good questioning skills as a manager gives you a massive advantage in doing your job so I am explaining 6 ways to improve your questioning skills as a manager. 

 Improving your questioning skills leads to so many benefits for you personally. You gain a better understanding of the problems you face, get to know your team members better, find out a whole lot more about what is really going on to name a few. 

 So the first way to improve your question techniques is to know your purpose before asking questions. You will then be able to structure your questions a lot better and use the different question types to achieve your aims. 

 Second, when developing questioning skills, think carefully about your audience. The art of asking the right questions for a given situation always includes thought about who you are asking questions to. Use their language, take into action their knowledge, skills and interests. 

 The way to improve your questioning skills is to manage your voice and body language carefully. 93% of how words are interpreted come from the non-verbal communication you are projecting. Pay careful attention to what you are communicating. 

 Fourth, to improve your questioning skills, suspend your judgement for as long as possible. Keep an open mind and really listen to what you are being told in answer to your question. This increases the effort of the other person and increases your understanding and appreciation of their position. 

 Fifth, when questioning others, get comfortable with and learn to use silence.  Giving the other person enough thinking time without interrupting is essential to getting good answers. Plus silence encourages the other person to answer. 

 When thinking about how to ask better questions, use active listening and aim for action. Active listening will give you a host of non-verbal clues about the other person and you can adapt your questioning based on these. Good questions, generally initiate action – either getting the other person thinking or acting.

 I also take you through 7 different types of questions giving you examples and brief explanations of when to use each question. 

Having to deal with a manager who undermines you is an extra tough situation to resolve. Managers  have more authority and influence with the company through their position than you are likely to have so dealing with this situation requires extra care and slightly different approach.

 I am taking your through the signs of undermining behaviour to look out for and 5 steps for how to deal with a manager who undermines you at work.

 It is a horrible feeling to have when you discover a manager undermining you in the business. I am sharing 7 signs to look out for. If you can spot a boss who undermines you quickly, you can take action quickly which should stop the undermining actions in their tracks. 

 When you have spotted the undermining actions, you can then work through the five actions to take when managers undermine you. Knowing what to do when managers undermine you really does help. 

 Firstly, collect examples of the undermining behaviour. This is an absolute must. You are looking to demonstrate a pattern of undermining behaviour rather than a few isolated mistakes. 

 Next speak to your manager about the manager undermining you (assuming it is NOT your line manager). Your line manager is a key source of support and help. 

 You might be thinking this manager undermining me is more senior – this is why it is very good to find allies at the manage in questions level or more senior. Allies to support your manager and you.

 Fourth, ask your manager and/or allies to confront the undermining manager on your behalf. This will be more effective than if you confront the manager who is undermining you.

 Fifth, if these actions are not sufficient to stop the undermining behaviour, then you can escalate to HR and or Senior Management. This is a last resort and should be undertaken with care. 

 So there you have five steps to take when managers undermine you. 

 I also cover what options you have if your manager is the one undermining you. This is very hard to deal with effectively.

 At the end of the video, I take you through 6 tips for how to market yourself internally in the business to counteract the impact of the undermining. Marketing yourself professionally is a great habit to get into anyway and even more useful when faced with a manager or colleague undermining you. 

 Good luck!

 Jess

Enhance.training 

7 methods to motivate your team gives you practical actionable methods to motivate a team which work with all teams.

 Knowing how to motivate a team is a great skill for any manager to have and everyone can learn how to motivate. Engaged and motivated teams perform a lot better and are much nicer places to work – great for everyone.

 So the first method to motivate a team is to share your vision with your team. Explain the direction and goals you want to achieve. Explain how this fits in with the company goals and why each team member has an important role to play. 

 The second way to motivate your team is to understand the goals of each team member. Everyone is different and have different hopes and dreams. Take each person through how achieving the company and team goals can also help the individual achieve some of their goals. 

 Leading by example is another way for motivating your team at work. I always found it very motivational being in a team with a hardworking successful manager who lives by the same rules they set for everyone. Leading by example is great for how to motivate and inspire employees.

  How to motivate team members as a leader includes actively developing team members. There are so many ways to develop team members without needing a large budget. Plan out what you can do to move each person in your team forward and keep them learning.

 When thinking to ways to motivate your team, praising regularly should feature highly. We all want praise for work well done and as a manager, look for opportunities to praise employees. Positive reinforcement really does work. 

 The sixth method to motivate a team is to proactively remove blockers. Having to fight against blockers is painful and demotivating. Look at your processes. Deal with conflict and underperformers. Deal with disruptive staff. Take action.

 Seventh, for how to motivate employees – practice a positive management style. There are many behaviours and actions that go into a positive management style – some we have covered already. Additional ones include promoting open communication, being consistent and spending time listening to your team members. These are all great actions to motivate your team

 Put into practice at least one of the methods outlined in “7 methods to Motivate your team”. Once you have this up and running, put into action the next one. It won’t be long before you have them all running, and you will quickly see the impact on team motivation.

 Enjoy working with a more motivated team!