The Effective Manager Book Feed

The definition of an Effective Manager is to achieve results while retaining your team members.

This guidance describes what a professional manager's role and limits are when it comes to being friends with our directs.

This cast prescribes asking your directs what their children's names are.

Managerial Economics covers more than just assigning work. It's a fundamental organizational principle, applied throughout organizations.

This cast describes the origins of the Management Trinity: why we preach it, and how it came to be.

In this cast, we conclude our conversation on the origins of the Management Trinity, focusing on Coaching and Delegation.

This cast includes Part 2 of our discussion on how to implement the Manager Tools' Management Trinity (One on Ones, Feedback, Coaching - and Delegation!).

This cast includes Part 4 of our discussion on how to implement the Manager Tools' Management Trinity (One on Ones, Feedback, Coaching).

This show describes the The Feedback Model's inclusion in the Management Trinity. We continue here our recent theme of revisiting the high level rationale and actions involved in the Management Trinity. In our discussion of feedback, we talk about the basics, of course: What the Feedback Model gives the effective manager, and how the effective [...]

Time management is a fallacy, we like to say. Time doesn't need you to "manage" it - it's been getting along just fine without you for billions of years. We can't manage time. But what we CAN manage is what we do with that time. And yet, the overwhelming evidence is that managers do NOT "manage what they do with that time." There's a shocking CHASM between our behavior in [...]

This cast describes how big to size a team when forming it.

This cast concludes our conversation on how to run timely meetings.

This cast concludes our recommendations on why and how to meet weekly, or regularly, with your peer managers.

Our guidance about a rarely used but powerful Manager Tool, The Skip Level.

This guidance addresses how personal One on Ones ought to be - should they be all about family and personal stuff, or just about work?

Mark and Mike discuss the single most effective management tool - the One-on-One.

Mark and Mike conclude their discussion on the single most effective management tool available today - the weekly One-on-One.

In this podcast, Mike and Mark share a technique managers can use to give feedback to their team members.

In this podcast, Mike and Mark share a technique managers can use to give feedback to their team members.

We've gotten a great many questions, comments, and kudos for our show in July on the Feedback Model. Many listeners are discovering the power of feedback, of taking it out of the realm of the rare and into the stream of the every day. Not to sound repetitive, but most managers see feedback as akin to holding their breath - waiting as long as possible, and then creating a [...]

Part 1 of our guidance on what to do if your direct keeps saying no when you ask if they're open to feedback.

A lot of managers implement MTO3's and quickly swear by them. But lots of managers mistakenly talk themselves out of giving feedback. Here's one way to look at it.

Our guidance on how long to wait before giving negative feedback to a direct.

Part 1 of our guidance on project management, using the Manager Tools Work Management Spreadsheet.

This guidance describes how to measure the amount of feedback you’re delivering to your directs.

In today's fast and flat world, ideas are becoming critical competitive advantages. Managers - and many others - need to be good at getting the most and best ideas from themselves and their teams. And, if you ask a hundred managers what are some of the tools they might use to generate ideas, the ONLY tool that would get 100 votes is brainstorming. The funny thing is, [...]

This cast describes the Manager Tools Revised Coaching Model.

This guidance describes how to assign tasks to your directs.

Today, Mark and Mike discuss the topic of Delegation. There probably isn't a management book out there that doesn't talk about the importance of delegation. However, very seldom does the author get into the type of detail we'll discuss today. Today, we cover the "how to"... how to determine what and to whom to delegate and specifically what specific steps to take when [...]

This guidance describes how to choose what to delegate using a simple Venn Diagram – the intersection between the direct, the manager, and the organization.

This guidance describes how to help individual contributors handle an overload in work.