Remind me – is stress a good thing or a bad thing?  

I  mean, some stress has to be a good thing, right? This is what motivates  your team to accomplish goals and meet deadlines. All of this is valid  information; however, it turns out that too much of a good thing can be a  bad thing. Too much stress can cause the members of your team to start to have some real physical problems. Your business practices can affect both the physical and the mental  state of the members of your team. 

How are you going to use your manager skills to do something about this manager?

What a great time it is to be searching for a new job! 

There are  currently more jobs out there than there are people to fill them. This  is all well and fine if you are a front line worker, but what if you are  a manager? There is the very real possibility that everyone who works  for you may be thinking about leaving. If that happens, you are going to  very quickly become an ineffective manager because you have nobody  working for you! 

How should managers deal with the great exitious?

What a great time it is to be searching for a new job! 

There are  currently more jobs out there than there are people to fill them. This  is all well and fine if you are a front line worker, but what if you are  a manager? There is the very real possibility that everyone who works  for you may be thinking about leaving. If that happens, you are going to  very quickly become an ineffective manager because you have nobody  working for you! 

How should managers deal with the great exitious?

Good news – the pandemic is over, now everyone can go back to the  office. 

Or is it? Managers are finding themselves in a tricky spot these  days. The initial wave of the pandemic seems to have started to ebb.  Companies have been eager to get their workers back into the office so  that they can benefit from all of the impromptu discussions, shared  insights, and easier management. However, now that it is starting to  look like the pandemic might not be over. Instead, multiple variants  have arisen and they seem to be even more contagious than the original  strain. Oh, and fully vaccinated people can catch the virus. 

What’s a  manager to do?

I don’t know about you, but in the past few years, I’ve been reading more and more articles that seemed to present Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the miracle cure for just about everything. 

There certainly has been  enough manager training on AI over the past few years. No matter if  it’s what your customer are going to buy next or what the office  temperature should be set to, the answer always seemed to have to do with AI.  

However, as time as moved on, managers are starting to discover that it  may turn out that AI really can’t solve all of our problems.

The job of every manager is to find ways to use their manager skills to get the most out of their teams.  

Although this is easy to say, it’s actually quite hard to do because  most of us don’t have any manager training on how to go about doing  this. One way that a manager can get more out of their team is by  finding ways to get the team to innovate. Innovation is the key to coming up with new ways of doing things that can make the  company more competitive and has a whole host of benefits. 

However, actually getting your team to become innovative is where most managers stumble.

As managers we are always looking for the next great job.  

No matter if it is with the firm that we are currently working for or  if it requires us to switch firms, finding a better job, perhaps with  more pay or a better title, is something that we are using our manager  skills to look for. However, once we get that next job, the reality may not live up to what our expectations were. 

When we find ourselves in a situation like this, what should we do?

Part of the job of being a manager is disagreeing with other people.  

Look, their ideas may be wrong and you are the person who is going to  have to step up and let them know that they are wrong. As you can well  imagine, this does not always go over well. This is where arguments come  from. Arguments are a natural part of life. However, knowing how to  argue is one of the key manager skills that we need to have. 

However,  since none of us have had any manager training in how to do this, most  of us do it incorrectly.

So would you say that you are a good manager or a bad manager? 

If,  somewhat oddly, you answered that you are a bad manager, I may have some  good news for you. As we are all very much aware, the past year has  been completely upside down. However, despite creating a great deal of  uncertainty about what everyone should be doing and making the job of  being a manager that much harder, it may have also created some  opportunities for us. 

What this means is that if you went into the  pandemic looking like a bad manager, you just might be able to come out  of it looking like a good manager.

Like most managers, you are probably pretty proud of yourself. 

You  understand the value that you bring to the table and you know that your  team is able to accomplish more because of you. However, feeling this  good about yourself can sometimes lead to you getting in the way of your  team. 

There are times that manager need to know when it’s time for them  to step aside in order to allow their team to be more productive.