Just in case you had not noticed it, the world has changed. 

Sexual  harassment has been going on in the workplace for a long time and thanks  to the #MeToo movement  it’s been brought out into the light. There is currently a big uproar  going on with new allegations of improper workplace behavior being  announced almost every day. 

As a manager who is both responsible for  using your manager skills to manage a team of both boys and girls as  well as working with boys and girls in other departments, the new rules for working in the modern workplace can appear to be quite confusing. 

So has your office gone to one of those “open office” floor plans?  

According to the really smart people, there are a lot of advantages of  this kind of open office design. However, one of the downsides to it is  that it can be all too easy for someone to show up unannounced at your desk and interrupt the work that you are doing  no matter how good your manager skills are. We want them to go away and  just leave us alone to do our work. 

In this kind of open office, what  can a manager to in order to tell the world that we just want to be left  alone? 

How much do you talk? Do you talk enough? Or perhaps, do you talk too much? 

A key part of the job of being a manager is using your manager skills to deliver good communication.  There are a lot of different ways for us to communicate;and talking is  one of the most important. However, it turns out that it is entirely  possible for us to to do too much talking. When this happens, the people  that we are talking to, just start to shut down and stop listening to  us. 

Do you talk too much? 

Every year when New Year’s rolls around we are all encouraged to use our manager skills to set goals for the upcoming year. 

Most of us actually do this and then we use those goals to guide us  as we plan our work. The best part of all of this is occasionally we  just happen to achieve one of our goals! The big question is how does  this success make you feel? Sometimes achieving a goal can leave us down  in the dumps, feeling blue, not happy at all. 

What’s up with this and  what can we do to prevent it? 

When we start a new manager job, things can be quite frustrating. 

Where  we were previously had probably allowed us to occupy leadership roles.  When we now find ourselves in a powerless position at  the bottom of the organization ladder no matter what manager skills we  have, it can be all too easy to start to think about switching jobs. 

The  question that managers need to be able to answer is how can we gain power when we are starting out with none? 

So what’s the worst thing that could happen to you as a manager? 

The  list of things could be quite long, but I think that we could all agree  that finding yourself trapped in a job that you don’t like would have to  be close to the top of the list. We can probably make this just a  little bit worse if we made it so that you had just accepted a new job  only to discover that despite your manager skills, you didn’t like it.  

What’s a manager to do if you find yourself in this unfortunate  situation? 

In order to manage the best team, you have to have the best team. 

What  this means is that one of your responsibilities as a manager is to use  your manager skills to recruit the best team  possible. 

During times when the job market is tight, this can be a real challenge. 

As a manager, we meet a lot of people. 

What this means for us is that we are responsible for a lot of first impressions. Although we may not spend a lot of time thinking about it, it turns out that those first impressions often shape how people choose to interact with us.  We’d like all of our first impressions to be positive, but our manager  skills really don’t give us all that much control over them. 

One of the  biggest problems that we run into is the simple fact that most people’s  first impressions are wrong. 

More and more companies are starting to realize that if they want to get the most out of their employees, they are going to have to get employees from different departments to work together.  

It turns out that this can be difficult to do. How is a manager going  to use their manager skills to get extroverted sales people to work with  introverted IT staff? How can creative types work with detail  orientated budget types? 

Making this happen is a new task that managers are going to have to get good at. 

It goes without saying that the #metoo movement  has resulted in the downfall of many formally powerful men: Harvey  Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, and Matt Lauer.  

Clearly there were a lot of very bad things going on in the  entertainment industry. As managers we need to understand what the  impact of all of this is going to be on our work environments. Is it  going to result in tougher polices towards office romances or changed  attitudes? 

What’s a manager to do?