As managers we all know that innovation is one of the keys to our team’s  long term success. 

The ability of the members of our team to interact  with each other, try out new ideas, refine those ideas and create  solutions to complex problems is one of the things that can make a team great. Then the pandemic struck. The result of this is that everyone got sent home to work. All of a sudden the creative energy that your team may have been generating got turned off. 

As a manager, how can you turn it back on?

As a manager, it turns out that finding ways to get the most out of your  team is not the only thing that you have to use your manager skills to  do when you are at work. 

Every day when you go into work you are really riding off to battle.  It turns out that your performance is always being measured against the  people that you work with. Eventually somebody is going to get  promoted, get a raise, or get a bonus. Will it be you or someone else?  This is something that none of us have any manager training on how to  deal with. 

Welcome to the real world: your co-worker is your top  competitor.

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed life for all of us. 

We used to go into  the office and use our manager skills to do manager stuff. Now we find ourselves staying at home and participating in countless Zoom meetings. In the beginning it was all new and different and we were able to focus  and get work done. 

However, things have changed over time and now it’s getting harder and harder to stay focused on our work. What’s a manager to do?

As managers, one of the jobs that our company expects us to perform is to use our manager skills to find the next generation of managers that will lead the company after we are gone. 

What this means for us is that we are responsible for taking a look at our team and identifying the team members that we believe would make good leaders.  This, of course, then brings up the question of just exactly what makes  someone a good leader. 

Managers need to know this so that they can make  the right staffing selections.

Managers are faced with a number of different challenges as they attempt  to perform their job. 

All of this is made even more difficult by the  simple fact that not everyone on your team is the same. Sprinkled in our  teams are the so-called millennial younger workers who have a different outlook on life than the older members of your team do. As a manager you have to take the time to understand what your millennial team members are looking for from their jobs so that you can determine if you can provide it. 

If you can get this right, then you have a much better chance of keeping your team together.

There is no question that the Covid-19 pandemic changed everything. 

One day we were all in the office getting along and  then the next day everyone was at home using Zoom to video conference  with each other. As life slowly starts to try to get back to normal,  managers have a real challenge on their hands. The Covid-19 virus has  not gone away and yet we’d still like to restart our normal office  interactions. 

What’s the best way to go about doing this?

During the course of a normal day, a manager has a lot of different  things that we need to spend time worrying about. 

However, using our  manager skills to keep the team that we have onboard is often not one of  the things that we worry about on an average day. However, perhaps we  should be. If we hold off until they are walking out the door in order  to find out why they are leaving, then it will probably be too late.  

What we really need to be doing is talking with the members of our team today in order to find out what we can do to get them to stick around longer.

As managers we always want to find ways to use our manager skills to get more things done.  

Our to-do lists just seem to keep getting longer and people are always  asking us to accomplish more things in less time. Our bosses are willing  to send us to manager training where we’ll learn how to look like we  are working hard even if we may not be producing as much as we should  be. Managers need to be careful and stop confusing productivity with getting results.  

Perhaps what we really should be doing is looking at how we can use  “slowness” to do a better job of accomplishing what we need to get done.

Anyone who follows basketball knows who Michael Jordon was. 

He was one of the truly great players. Season after season he lead  his team to success. It turns out that one of the reasons that his team  was so successful was not just because of Michael’s incredible  basketball talent, but also because of his leadership style. 

Is there something that managers can learn from Michael’s manager skills?

As though the job of being a manager was not tough enough, it turns out  that there is something that can make it just a bit more challenging: change. 

You know what I’m talking about here. Every so often your company gets the good idea that they could become more effective if they reorganized.  Arggg! This is exactly the kind of thing that can throw even the best  laid plans up into the air no matter what manager skills you have. Keep  in mind that none of us have any manager training on how to deal with  situations like this. 

What is a manager to do when a reorganization happens?