Tag Archives for " teams "

The Right Side of ‘My Way or the Highway’

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

Seemingly every time a leader is faced with a difficult decision that adversely affects someone else, the first criticism is simple: “He/she is just a micromanager. It’s ‘my way or the highway.’” Yes, micromanagers are very common, but decisions that people don’t like or agree with don’t automatically signal micromanagement. This would mean a leader who makes any decision is, by definition, a micromanager if anyone disagrees with the decision. Which is quite ridiculous.

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Yes, Managers Are Hurting Employee Performance

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

What counts in business is performance – not promises of performance, not excuses for a lack of performance, and certainly not mediocre performance. It’s the results that matter; what people actually produce in the workplace. The problem is that sub-par employee performance is often created by MANAGERS. Yes, that is correct. Poor performance is often a result of what the manager does – or, more accurately, does not do.

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The Invisible Trap of the Most Important Management Activity

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

What I mean to say is that – for managers – perhaps the process of determining the most important thing is the most important thing they do. After all, someone has to determine the priorities of the team, right? Which is to say that perhaps THE most important thing for a manager to do is to make sure that the priorities chosen are the right ones. Good thought. Unfortunately, this idea can also cause a team to drive off a cliff.

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When You Cannot Take a Vacation

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

The truth is, when the troops can’t do without you — when you cannt take a vacation because the place will fall apart — both your work and personal life can get ugly. You never seem to have enough time to get to the truly important things, and team performance is necessarily going to suffer. It will suffer now because you’re the bottleneck in a system that limits the team’s output, and it will suffer later because you fail to develop the talent underneath. That failure will inevitably result in long-term employee disengagement, mediocre performance, and – no joke – health issues.

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