So where do you want to work? 

This used to be a fairly easy question to  answer: everyone went into the office when they went to work. However,  that darn pandemic changed everything for everyone. We all spend a year  working from home. A lot of us discovered that we liked working from home.  There was no commute to the office required. We didn’t have to dress  up. However, now that the pandemic is pretty much over, a lot of  companies are telling their workers to come back into the office.  

However, what if a manager doesn’t want to go back to the office? What  will the impact on their career be?

As a manager, we know that the key to our success is the ability to get  along with the members of our team. 

It turns out that things go a bit  deeper than that. In order for our team to be successful, everyone on the team has to get along with everyone else who is on the team.  I’d like to be able to tell you that this is something that just seems  to happen naturally; however, there are times that it doesn’t. 

When a  manager is encountering a problem either with getting along with the  team or with various members of the team getting along with each other,  it might be time for everyone to go to couples counseling.

As we move further and further into the 21st Century, what work looks like is continuing to change. 

Managers realize that successful teams  exhibit a type of office camaraderie where the different members of the  team are willing to go above and beyond for the other members of their  team. This can start to get tricky when we start to include remote workers as a part of our teams.  These workers can easily start to appear as just faceless strangers  while they feel alienated from the team members at the office. 

How can a  manager use their manager skills to make their divided team feel as though they are all part of the same team?

The world of workplaces has undergone a great deal of change. 

It used to  be that everyone would go into work, sit at a desk, and then go home  again at the end of the day. The pandemic sent everyone home for a year  and the workplace that we all knew and loved appears to be gone for  good. What is taking its place is being called a “hybrid work  environment”. In this new working environment, managers are going to  have to discover what they will need to be doing differently. Our goals  are still the same – we want to get the most out of our teams. 

However,  how we actually go about doing that is going to be different.

As managers, our manager training has taught us a thing or two about how to run successful meetings.  

We know that we need to keep them short, tightly focused, and limit the  number of people that we permit to attend. Our goal is to avoid having  to attend those time wasting events that seem to go on and on forever.  We know the drill: meetings should not last more than 30 minutes, we  should not invite too many people, and we should always show up with an  agenda for the meeting. However, not all meetings are created equal.  There are some meetings that by their very nature are going to be long  and complicated. 

How should managers go about handling these?

As a manager, one of the most important things that we are tasked with  doing is using our manager skills to make sure that our teams are fully  staffed. 

In order to do this, we have to perform a set of tasks:  interview candidates, select the ones that best meet our needs, make an  offer, hope that they accept the offer, and then onboard them. However,  this whole process can fall apart if the candidate that we’ve selected turns our offer down. It turns out that roughly half of the candidates that have been offered a job have turned it down because they had a negative experience during the hiring process. 

How can you create an inclusive and welcoming first impression?

Managers, at least the good ones, realize that we don’t know it all.  

Sure, back in the day we went to school and took a lot of classes. We  learned a lot. Then we went out and got jobs. Since then we’ve probably  not been learning that many new things. As the world in which we work  continues to spin and evolve, we understand that there are a lot of  things that we probably need to take the time to learn about. Things  like agile development, that new 5G wireless technology, even things  like emotional management. The problem that we all face is to find the  time that is needed to learn new things. 

How can we make this happen?

If you’ve been doing any negotiating, then you’ve probably heard the term “anchoring”.  

This, of course, brings up the question “what exactly is anchoring in  negotiation, and how does it play out at the bargaining table?” 

If you  want to become a better negotiator, then you are going to have to learn how to use this powerful negotiating tool.

When a manager is looking to use their manager skills to add someone to  their team, what are the qualities that we should be looking for? 

Sure,  we often go looking for a future team member who will be driven,  aggressive, and focused on reaching their goals.  However, is it possible that we’ve been getting this all wrong? It  turns out that the personality trait that predicts success at work more  than any other is associated with some very different tendencies: 

What we should be using our manager training to look for in new teammates is conscientiousness.

The Covid-19 pandemic caused just about every office to shut down and  close their doors. 

Each member of your team started working from home  and as a manager you had a whole new set of issues that you had to work  through in order to keep your team both together and productive.  However, now things are once again starting to change. The arrival of a  vaccine has allowed business to once again consider having their workers  come back into the office. 

However, from a manager point of view this  is going to require us to have a new set of skills.