If your boss continually piles work on your plate, even when it’s not related to your goals, learn to say no. Pushing back can be tricky, so handle the request carefully:
management
What Makes Employees Want to Stay
If you’ve gone through the effort to hire the right people for the job, you want them to stay. So what makes employees want to stick around?
Build a Better Innovation Team
No matter how great your idea, your innovation effort will fall apart if the wrong team executes it. Here are three steps for hiring a team that will help you achieve breakthroughs:
Make a Critical Trade-Off
Most important business decisions require compromise: To do one thing, you have to give up another. Next time you need to decide between conflicting priorities, try doing these three things:
Get Clear Direction from a Boss Who Is Vague
If your boss routinely delegates projects without telling you how things should get done, and then picks apart your work and asks you to start over, you need to get proactive.
Recognize Employees Who Step Up
Some of your most valuable employees are those junior staff who act and contribute far beyond their pay grade. Look out for these individuals so you can recognize them, cultivate their talents, and set them up as examples to others. Here are three characteristics to spot:
Signs You May Be a Cowardly Leader
Is cowardice the worst characteristic a leader can have?
When Starting a Company, Get Your Values Right
As a start-up gets off the ground, it has a short-lived opportunity to decide how it wants to do business. With each new hire company culture becomes more entrenched and somewhere after two dozen employees, it tends to cement. Establish a set of genuine values before your start-up gets too complex.
How to Recharge Your Leadership in Trying Times
It’s been a tough five years for the economy and anyone associated with it. The worst recession and bear market since the 1930s. Shrinking nest eggs. Mass layoffs. Chronic unemployment and underemployment. And those lucky enough to have jobs can find themselves burdened by fear of job loss and the pressure to “do more with less.”
Ease Your Employees into Change
Change can be scary. But the best leaders smooth over the transition by supporting their teams and advocating for them. To foster this kind of environment, try these three things:
Don’t Pursue a Doomed Idea
When it comes to innovation, irrationality can be a blessing. Many a great decision has resulted from people taking risks that didn’t make logical sense at the time. But irrationality can also blind innovators to real problems. Here are three ways to seek the right amount of reason:
When to Let Go and Delegate
As an entrepreneur, you typically want to do it all yourself, but there comes a time when you need to turn over some responsibilities to someone else. In fact, that should be your goal if you want your company to grow.