The Agile Manager Skills That You Need To Have!
By Jim Anderson
“I don’t embrace excuses for why teams aren’t being successful, I embrace solutions.”
Over the last 25 years, Dr. Anderson has transformed failing teams worldwide. Dr. Anderson will turn these lost teams into department champions.
Dr. Jim Anderson understands what it is like to both work in a department as an employee as well as a manager.
Welcome to the premier podcast for learning how to attract, motivate, and retain top staff.
The Agile Manager Skills That You Need To Have!Jul 28, 2022
Mangers Need To Deal With Younger Team Members Who Feel Lonely
The goal of every manager is to find a way to get the most out of each of their team members.
What this means is that we need use our manager skills to stay on top of them and always be monitoring what their current status is. What we need to be looking for are team members who are feeling remote or disconnected. They won’t be able to function well with the rest of the team and their work performance may start to slack off.
One thing that managers need to keep their eyes open for is when the younger members of their team start to show signs of feeling lonely – this is when a manager needs to step in.
Managers Deal With The Problem Of Too Much Videoconferencing
As the world has changed and we are all working remotely, video conferencing has arrived as a way for everyone to stay in contact.
In the beginning it was an amusing novelty and gave us a chance to see where everyone lives. However, the initial novelty has now worn off. Just about everyone has become tired of video conferencing and sorta wishes that it would go away. As a manager, you need your team to stay connected and video conferencing is an important tool.
What can you do to use your manager skills to prevent video conferencing burn out?
Should Managers Be Using Emojis At Work?
So can we talk about email?
It’s a key part of our life and it seems like we spend a great deal of time each day using our manager skills to read emails that have been sent to us and composing emails to send to others. However, email has always had a problem. It turns out that the written word does a very poor job of conveying how the sender is feeling when they are sending it. When we talk to people we can read their body language and facial expressions – not so when we are reading their emails.
It turns out that there is a way around this problem – emojis.
Just Exactly How Should Managers Go About Delegating Tasks?
As a manager, there never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done.
I’m pretty sure that we all wish that we could clone ourselves so that we would have more hands to help with all of the work that needs to be done.
It turns out that cloning does not yet exist; however, if you can learn how to delegate effectively then you just might be able to find the help that you need in order to get all of your work done.
How Managers Can Get Over Their Addiction To Email
As managers, a great deal of each day is taken up with dealing with email.
No matter if it is sorting through all of the new email that has arrived since we last took a look at it or it is crafting the perfect response to that email that we just got, all of this stuff takes time. A lot of time.
How can a manager use our manager skills to get over our addiction to email?
Managers Deal With Employees Who Aren’t Coming Back
Let’s face it: being a manager is a tough job.
We’ve got to find ways to motivate our team to work together in order to accomplish shared goals that will allow the company to meet its objectives. This is not an easy thing to do. Then the pandemic hit and everybody went home for a year. As the pandemic wanes, many firms are deciding that it’s time for their staff to come back to the office. They want the interaction that can only happen there – the exchange of ideas, the realization of things that need to be accomplished. Just one problem: not all of your team members want to come back into the office.
What’s a manager to do?
- Listen To The Podcast! Check out the best Manager podcast out there. Updated each week: https://bit.ly/2TgDhSn
http://theaccidentalitleader.com/management-2/managers-deal-with-employees-who-arent-coming-back
What A Manager Can Do To Get Their Team To Communicate
We all know what is asked of mangers: go out there and get the best team that you can.
We do this – we try very hard to both attract and retain the best people to become members of our team. However, it turns out that that is not all that we need to be doing. Getting our team members to communicate is key to making the team successful.
As a manager, you need to take a look at your team and if communication is not happening, then you need to make some changes.
Managers Want To Know Why Their Team Members Will Leave
As though you didn’t have enough else to worry about as a manager, it turns out that using your manager skills to keep your team together is an important part of what the company has hired you to do.
We all understand that the people who make up your team are always getting calls from headhunters, suggestions from friends, and emails talking about great new jobs. None of this matters if they are happy where they currently are. However, if they start to become irritated with their job, then the chances that they’ll leave become greater.
Do you know what could cause the members of your team to leave?
Should Managers Be Looking For Employees With Videogame Skills?
When you think of someone who plays video games, what do you think of?
If you are like most of us, you picture a young man with long stringy hair that is unwashed, perhaps wearing a flannel shirt, black jeans, and combat boots. This person probably doesn’t want to make eye contact with you and instead prefers to talk with his friends. It turns out that your image of a gamer is way out of date. First off, girls play video games also. Additionally, the video game universe has grown so much that video gamers now look like just about any young person that you might run into.
This brings up an interesting point for managers: are video gamers the people that we should be hiring?
Should Managers Be Looking For Employees With Videogame Skills?
When you think of someone who plays video games, what do you think of?
If you are like most of us, you picture a young man with long stringy hair that is unwashed, perhaps wearing a flannel shirt, black jeans, and combat boots. This person probably doesn’t want to make eye contact with you and instead prefers to talk with his friends. It turns out that your image of a gamer is way out of date. First off, girls play video games also. Additionally, the video game universe has grown so much that video gamers now look like just about any young person that you might run into.
This brings up an interesting point for managers: are video gamers the people that we should be hiring?
What Managers Should Do If Team Members Are Too Engaged
One of the primary jobs of a manager is to find a way to use our manager skills to get the members of their team to become engaged with the work that they are doing. If we can accomplish this, then productivity can go up, teamwork will increase, and everyone should be happy.
However, as with all such things in life, it turns out that there is a downside to doing this.
Team members can become too engaged in what they are working on and this is going to create a different set of problems for a manager.
Managers Struggle To Deal With Success
It does not happen all the time.
However, sometimes a manager will be successful. Something that we attempt will happen the way that we wanted it to or we might just get lucky and a success will drop into our laps. However, the problem with being successful is that sometimes this can be a big problem in helping us to grow and develop. What managers need to do is to find ways to use their manager skills learn from their success.
How should managers deal with success?
Are Questions The Key To Becoming A Better Manager?
We would all like to use our manager skills to be better managers.
The big question that all of us deal with each and every day is just exactly what kind of manager training do we need to make this happen. It turns out that if we keep doing the things that we are doing right now, nothing is going to change. We will never become better. What we need to learn how to do is to change things up and do things differently. One of the most powerful tools that a manager has is the questions that we ask the members of our team. However, if we keep asking them the same questions, then we’ll just get the same answers.
In order to become a better manager, we need to learn how to ask better questions.
Managers Need To Learn How To Praise Their Team Members
When someone on your team does good work, what do you do?
I’m hoping that the answer is that you take time out of your day and use your manager skills to praise them. If you can figure out how to do this the right way, then your praise can get them to work harder, work smarter, encourage them to try new things, and to take risks.
However, you’ll only be able to achieve this if you know how to praise them in the right way.
5 Things That Managers Can Do For Their Team
As a manager, what is your legacy going to be?
Do you want to be remembered as being a good manager or as a bad manager? The best managers are remembered for what they did for their team, the bad ones are remembered for what they did to their team. Using your manager skills to be remembered as a good manager is a tricky thing to do. It’s tricky because, as a manager, it’s easy to focus solely on tending to the business and your career, forgetting that tending to your team first will take care of both.
Here are the five most powerful things you can do for your team today in order to do right by your team.
Managers Have To Learn How To Deal With People Who Don’t Like Change
So just exactly how much change is there in your life right now?
If you are like most of us you’d probably say that there is a lot of change going on. What this means is that there is probably a lot of change going on for your team also. What managers need to understand is that we all tend to deal with change differently. The members of your team will be a great example of this. Some will take to new things like a duck takes to water – they’ll dive in and learn all about it. However, others will push back and won’t want to change.
When this happens, you are going to have to use your manager skills and get them to accept the change.
What Managers Need To Know About Staff Training
One of the biggest challenges that we face as managers is finding ways to use our manager skills to keep the members of our team satisfied with their job and not looking to jump ship and go work for someone else.
One of the simplest ways that we can make this happen is by identifying training and development programs that offer advantages for team members and managers alike.
They provide means for team members who are looking to keep their skills sharp, and help managers address skills gaps, while improving employee engagement and desire to stay with the company.
What Does It Take To Be A Good Manager?
An interesting question that many of us may not have spent a lot of time thinking about is what does it take to be a good manager?
All too often in today’s fast paced world of business, many people find themselves in management positions with little to no manager training and no manager skills. Additionally, they have no idea how to deal with direct reports. All too often companies no longer offer any training to those people that they are placing in management roles and they are making people managers when they are younger and they are doing it without any training.
What is it going to take to make sure that we become good managers?
Managers Seek Better Ways To Fire Employees
So let’s face it – firing a team member is never an easy thing for a manager to do.
You hired this person, you’ve worked with them, and you’ve attempted to correct anything that they were doing wrong, but now it’s reached the so-called “end of the road” and you find yourself in a position where you need use your manager skills to let them go. No manager comes into work early on days like this. However, in our current day and age the newspapers are full of articles about fired workers turning violent or causing conflict.
What’s the right way to let someone go?
How Can Managers Make Meetings Better?
One of the least desirable parts of being a manager is the number of meetings that we find ourselves attending.
In fact, there seem to be some days that are just back-to-back meetings that never seem to end. While we are in these meetings it’s pretty common for a manager to wish that they were just about any other place. It turns out that meetings are important ways for information to get shared within a company. However, it sure seems that a lot of the meetings that we find ourselves attending despite our manager skills are a complete waste of our time.
Isn’t there a better way to do these things?
What Is The Cost Of A Stressed Out Team?
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?
Are You Going To Be The Last Manager Standing?
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?
Are You Going To Be The Last Manager Standing?
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?
How Managers Should Plan For A Return To The Office
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?
Managers Start To Discover The Limitations Of Artificial Intelligence
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.
Managers Learn That Innovation Works Best As A Team
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.
What A Manager Should Do When They Are In The Wrong Job
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?
Do You Know How To Argue Correctly?
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.
How Bad Managers Can Become Good Managers
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.
Good Managers Know When To Stand Aside
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.
Four Things That Google Learned About Managers
We all know who Google is, right?
Well it turns out that they like data and they like processing data. What this means for managers is that Google spends their time collecting data about how managers are using their manager skills to manage their teams and then they process that data. They used to think that the smartest people made the best managers, turns out that they were wrong – they needed to get some manager training. It’s the people who do the best job of working with people. Google’s been collecting data for quite some time and they have recently gone back and taken a look at their data.
Four new characteristics of a good manager have shown up.
3 Things Managers Need To Be Aware Of When Hiring
There are a lot of parts of being a manager that are tough.
One of the most challenging is when it comes time for us to hire someone to join our team. The world is filled with a lot of people and there will probably be many who want to get a job at your company working on your team. As a manager, it’s going to be your job to use your manager skills to sort through all of the candidates in order to find the best match. This is not an easy thing to do.
However, there are three key secrets that you need to keep in mind when you are looking for that next new hire.
How Can A Manager Get A Promotion?
Sure you are enjoying your manager position, but wouldn’t you like to receive a raise?
There is a problem with getting a raise: when it comes to using your manager skills to ask for a promotion or raise, most of us focus the conversation around the same thing: ourselves. All too often this does not get us the outcome that we want.
What we really need to do is to listen to what social science research has found out about how we can make it one more rung up our career ladder.
What’s The Best Way For A Manager To Interview For A Job
When a manager goes interviewing for a job, they may find it odd to be on the other side of the interviewing table.
We use our manager skills to do a lot of interviewing as a part of our job; however, when we go looking for our next job we need to know how to use our manager training to do so successfully.
What’s the best way for a manager to get the job that they are interviewing for?
What Should Managers Look For In A Mentor?
In order to become better managers, we all realize that there are a number of ways to make this happen.
We can go seek manager training and try to develop the manager skills that we know that we need. However, there is another way to go about becoming better: get a mentor.
If you decide to go this route, right off the bat you’ll be faced with a difficult question: what should you look for in a mentor?
Before You Take That New Job, Check Out Its Culture
As managers, we are often presented with opportunities to switch jobs.
We may be presented with a new job that catches our attention and we may start to seriously start to think about switching employers. However, as attractive as a new job may appear, it might be in our own best interest to not rush into taking a new job.
One of the big questions that we have to use our manager skills to answer before making any jump is to determine what the culture of the new company is.
The Problem With Lying At Work
Life is complicated and, yes, there are times when it is inconvenient to tell the truth.
It can be as simple as one of you friends asking if you like the outfit that they are wearing (you don’t) or your boss asking if that report will be done by the end of the day (it won’t). It can be very easy to “bend the edges” or tell white, gray, or even black lies when we are at work.
Our manager training does not teach us how big of a deal this really is.
Can Managers Count On Millennials Sticking Around?
Managers who have built a successful team are always worried about one thing: are their workers going to stay?
As more and more of our teams are being built using members of the millennial generation a lot of us have become worried because we don’t have any manager training on how to get people to stay. The typical description of a millennial worker is one who moves around a lot looking for the next best thing.
Should managers be worried that their team members are going to be moving on?
Managers Want To Know Why Being A Leader Is So Hard To Do
Ok, hopefully we can all agree that the basic management stuff is pretty easy for just about anyone with manager skills to do: sign time cards, have an annual review, keep things on track.
These things don’t require a great deal of manager training. I like to think of management as being the process of having everyone work on what they are supposed to be doing when you are in the room. However, then we move on to that tricky thing: leadership. I think of leadership as getting the people who are a part of your team to be so committed that they keep doing what they are supposed to be doing even when you are not in the room.
Is It Time To Quit?
Let’s face it: we’ve all been through a lot.
Life may have been quite busy before, but then that pandemic thing happened and things just sorta went out of control no matter how good your manager skills are. Now that life is getting back to normal, it’s perfectly ok for you to be thinking about perhaps quitting your job and looking for a new one. Although this is an acceptable thought to be having, before you pull the trigger and submit your resignation there are a few things that you might want to consider.
You want to make sure that any major change that you make like this is the right thing for you to be doing at this point in time.
Will Working From Home Keep You Behind?
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?
Does Your Team Need Couples Counseling?
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.
Managers Deal With The Challenge Of Remote Workers
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?
How Managers Can Manage A Hybrid Work Environment
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.
How To Prepare For Long, Complicated Meetings
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?
How Managers Can Get Candidates To Stop Turning Down Job Offers
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?
How Managers Can Learn New Skills?
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?
Learning To Use Anchors In A Negotiation
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.
Managers Have To Practice Conscientiousness
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.
Managers Prepare To Use AI As Their Offices Start To Open Up
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.