As managers we know that staffing our teams with the best people for the  job is a critical part of creating teams that can accomplish great  things. 

However, all too often when you take a look at how a company is  going about hiring people, you’ll discover that somehow the process has become broken.  Lots of companies like to talk about making the hiring process better,  but they don’t seem to know how to go about doing this. 

What needs to  change?

If you are a manager and you have an opening on your team, what do you  do? 

If you are like most of us your HR department is going to come to  you and ask that you create a job description so that they can go post it and see who applies for it. This is the way that we’ve always done things. However, it has not always worked out all that well. The wrong people apply for jobs or, even worse, too many people apply for an open position. Something has to change. 

Managers have to learn how to write job descriptions.

Managers are aware that the modern workplace is having technology added  to it every day. 

The new technologies that companies are using includes  things like fingerprint and facial scanners. Every time that a worker  gets scanned, more and more data about that worker is collected by the company.  What is starting to happen is that workers are becoming aware of the  enormous amount of data about them that the company is collecting.  Workers are starting to go to court to challenge the company in regards  to how their biometric data is being stored and used. 

What manager  skills does a manager need to have in order to know about what is going  on?

So manager – are you overconfident? 

I’m pretty sure that we all know that being self-confident is one of the manager skills that we all need in order to be a great manager. However, it turns out that there is a dark side to this trait – we can easily become overconfident.  When we are confident we act decisively and challenge other people.  When we are overconfident we become arrogant and we rush into bad  decisions. 

How can we tell if we have crossed the line from being  confident to becoming over confident?

So the big question that I have for you is what kind of boss are you currently working for?  

Right now it is very trendy to be a disruptive leader. These types of  bosses have a take-no-prisoners management style that can both ignite  new trends within the company while at the same time crushing the  competition. However, it turns out that there is also a darker side to these types of bosses. 

If this describes your boss, do you know how to work with them?

There is no question about it: we are currently living in a time of  almost unimaginable grief. 

There are always things that are making the  members of your team feel sad and down. However, with the arrival of the  Covid-19 pandemic and the death and destruction that has come along  with it, we are all feeling even more emotionally battered than ever  before. As a manager who is responsible for a team of workers, you need  to use your manager skills to understand what your team is currently going through.  

It is going to be up to you to help the members of your team deal with  the grief that they are currently experiencing and help them to find a  way to move forward.

In the new world in which we are all living, video conferencing (perhaps  via Zoom) has become commonplace. 

What this means for managers is that  we are having to use our manager skills to adjust to a new way of  working. Since we are responsible for our teams, this means that we are  responsible for how they communicate via tools such as Zoom. It turns  out that what we need to be on the lookout for are team members who are  behaving badly while Zooming. 

Before we can take action, we first have to know what we are looking for.

So just how busy are you? 

If you are like most managers these days you  have more work to do than you have hours in a day. We understand that  there is a great deal of work that needs you to use your manager skills  to get done. However, more and more there seem to be tasks that we  consider to be “low-priority” that keep showing up on our desks. We really don’t want to waste our time working on these issues, but they keep coming our way. 

What’s a manager to do?

Technology is a wonderful thing. 

It has allowed managers to use their  manager skills to build teams that no longer have to be located in the  same location. However, when a team is distributed, there are set of new challenges that managers need to be aware of and find ways to deal with.  A team that does not have to work side by side may not develop the same  sense of team spirit that can help a team to be successful. 

What this  means for managers is that we need to find ways to create a sense of teamwork among our remote teams.

Clearly the pandemic has changed just about everything having to do with going to work. 

As the season for end-of-the-year performance reviews starts to arrive, many team members may be starting to experience the  standard level of dread that they feel every year. However, the pandemic  has changed everything else and so perhaps it should also change the way that evaluations are done. 

This is something that managers need to carefully consider.