The Managers Hub

Overwhelm-Laying it Out for Management

Overwhelm means to crush, submerge or destroy. Overwhelm derails your ability to manage well. It is a powerful energy that often comes quietly. You try to get just one more thing done. You think you can do what you can’t. The result: overwhelm overtakes you. What’s the antidote? Prevent it. Be aware of your stress [...]

Keeping Your Head While Managing

Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” is an inspirational one for me. Can you keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you? Keeping your head is not a requisite of success in many organizations. Some managers lose their heads every day-bully bosses, anger management class candidates, idiots. However, not keeping [...]

Seth Godin: Managers Are Not Leaders

Seth Godin posits in his book Tribes that managers are not leaders. He says managers manage by using the authority the factory has given them; that leaders don’t care much about organization and authority, they use passion and ideas to lead people. Later, Godin provides an example of a researcher at the Pentagon who acted [...]

Managing Your Priorities By Doing Nothing

Yes, sometimes you can best manage your priorities by doing nothing. What is a priority anyway? It’s a task at the front of the queue. The doing nothing comes in for tasks not in the front of the queue. Can you ignore these secondary tasks until your priorities are handled? Yes, you can. Because getting [...]

‘Round Midnight’ – A Marker for Balance

(a 1944 jazz standard by pianist Thelonious Monk) Where you are ‘round midnight’ may tell you something about your life and career. As a manager, it is a given that you have a lot on your plate. Round midnight there are many possibilities-you are still working, you are worrying about work, you want to sleep [...]

“Make It Happen” – Are You Ready to Lead?

As a manager, how often do you hear the phrase “Make it Happen” in your workplace? Translation: “Get it done, I can’t help you.“ Sometimes you hear it because your boss wants you to be more resourceful and independent. Other times, you hear it because your boss cannot help you, but still wants you to [...]

Can You Manage in a Matrix?

Matrix organization: a cross-functional work team, which brings together individuals who report to different parts of the company in order to complete a particular project or task. Managing in a matrix is laughable without established priorities, resource allocation and defined goals, fully supported by top management. How many matrix managers have that? Not many. The [...]