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Getting your first management or team supervision role is very exciting and a little scary. Firstly congratulations and welcome to your new career of managing people. 

 In 8 Tips for New Managers I share 8 very useful tips for those new in the manager role. We all have a preconceived image of what a manager should be like and when we start, we want to do a good job. The pressure is on yet we should remember to just be ourselves and not be someone we are not. If I had to chose tips for new managers, this would be the most important.

 The next of my new manager tips when starting at a new job is to get to know your team. Your key job is helping others do their best and to do this you must get to know them on a personal level.

 The next of new manager tips is to remember you are a boss not a friend. This is a hard transition, particularly if you are now managing your old peer group. Without some emotional distance, people management is a lot harder in my view.

 These tips for new managers and supervisors give you a lot of points on how to understand what is now expected on you and also how to set expectations of those you manage. Being in the middle is hard work.

 I am a huge believer in developing my teams and I think it is very important step in how to be a great manager. This takes time, effort and thought on the part of the manager yet is paid back many times over at a personal and team level. 

 It is just as important in terms of developing your people management skills that you keep learning and developing as a manager. You really need to practice what you learn as often as you can to get better.

 Enjoy 8 Tips for New Managers and enjoy managing your team!

Creating a good relationship with your manager is pretty vital if you want to be happy at work, get a bonus, get promoted and progress your career.  In 10 Great Tips to Manage Your Manager I share practical tips I have used to build and maintain good relationships with wide range of managers and indirect “bosses”.

 When thinking about how to manage your boss’ expectations, a great place to start is to ensure you are doing a good job or at least average compared to peers. That way, when managing your boss, they already view you as an asset to the team. Delivering what you need to is a great way to start building relationships at work.

 Every manager is different, so when learning how to manage your boss, ask them how they like to be managed. How you manage up should be tailored to your specific manager.

 As you plan how to manage your manager ask them what they expect of you. If you don’t know what good or okay looks like in their eyes, meeting that expectation is harder. 

 It is in your interests, when managing up, to take responsibility for managing relationships at work and particularly with your manager. Your boss influences so much of your working life therefore it must be a no-brainer to be proactive in creating a positive professional relationship.

 A key part of expectation management at work is to reduce the number of surprises for colleagues and particularly your manager. Surprises, both positive and negative, hinder planning and impact how your manager in turn manages their boss’s expectations. 

 How to manage your manager is well is not as hard as it might seem at first. Think how you would like to be treated and replicate this for your manager. How to manage your boss effectively requires a little planning and effort on your part and taking some or all of the steps outlined in “10 Great Tips to Manage Your Manager” will make a significant positive different to your relationship with you manager. Make the effort – it really is in your best interests if you want to be happier at work, get interesting projects to work on, get a bonus and get promoted. 

 Good luck in practicing how to manage your boss!

In How to Set Objectives for the Team, I take you through a tried and tested 5 step approach to set clear, actionable, objectives which have team member buy in.

 If you are going to put the effort into objective and goal setting, you want to ensure that your objectives help drive accountability and deliver improving team performance. There are many elements that go into how to improve team results. Setting employee goals and objectives is an excellent place to start. 

 Objective setting for managers will involve some effort on your part but the time taken to set objectives will be repaid in benefits to you, your team, and the company. I view how to set goals and objectives to be an essential part of good team management. 

 When you are thinking of how to set goals and create an action plan it really helps to start with the end in mind. Think about what you are wanting or needing to achieve. The company, function or department strategy is a good place to start. 

 Setting objectives from the top down helps co-ordinate activities particularly when you are thinking about how to improve teamwork effectiveness across the company and within your own team.

 Get the team involved in setting objectives. This significant improve buy-in to the objectives and goals. I think this also helps solve the how to improve teamwork and communication challenge when working through the goals and objectives in the different parts of the team. 

 Make sure the objectives are specific and everyone knows and understands exactly when we have reached the objective. Make your goals and objectives SMART.

 And finally, plan how you are going to measure your progress and create visibility of progress with all team members and stakeholders. This helps drive accountability and engages peer pressure to support the overall team performance. 

Enjoy managing and leading your team!

Why we should set objectives for our team may seem obvious to some, yet many teams I started working with didn’t have objectives or specific goals to achieve. 

 Why set objectives?

 Setting objectives or goals is a great place to start improving team performance at work. Setting goals for a team helps everyone. Objectives provide direction and focus, helps create accountability, and I think must be one of your team management techniques.

 Setting objectives for a team does take time and effort yet gives a massive return on that investment by improving performance in the workplace. Delivering better results or improved performance of your team and achieving goals reflects well on your own team management skills. 

 For me, why we should set objectives for our team is a no-brainer – performance and happiness of the team improves. We all like to know what is expected of us, and in my experience most team members want to do a good job. Setting objectives and setting employee goals is a great tool to allow them and the manager to know when they have done a great job.

 When you are managing a team within a larger business, setting objectives through the functions and teams helps improve business co-ordination. Each team supports the activities of the other teams rather than not-support or even hindering them. Objectives and goal setting help co-ordinate activities. 

 Setting goals and objectives are part of team leadership. To get the most from the work you put into setting objectives, you must keep reminding the team and individuals about their objectives, track progress to reaching your goals and coach and mentor the team members to help them achieve their goals. 

 If the team does well, the manager of that team usually does well. 

 If you haven’t set clear, specific objectives with your team, why not start now.

In “How to Give Performance Feedback to Team Members” I share how to tackle giving really useful feedback – positive and negative - to others on their performance that they will appreciate and that will help them improve what they do.

 Giving performance feedback to employees can be hard to do. If feedback is negative, we are worried about offending the other person, creating resentment, ruining relationships, and making our own lives harder at work. When we are giving positive feedback, how to we make the feedback useful further improve performance or behaviours.

 Giving feedback and constructive feedback is essential to help our colleagues and team members improve what they do. It is also essential for managers and leaders to receive employee feedback to help them improve their performance too. 

 Practicing giving feedback will improve how you deliver feedback. Start with giving positive feedback. Don’t just say “you have done a good job”, practice breaking down why they have done a good job and be specific in your feedback so that the other person understand exactly why you are giving positive feedback. 

 When you are more confident giving positive feedback, you will feel more confident having the more difficult conversations at work. No-one enjoys these conversations no matter how experienced they are, yet if you want performance to improve, you need to provide a balance of positive feedback and negative feedback. 

 With practice you learn how to give feedback and increase your confidence in doing so. I think you should always approach giving feedback with the other person’s development at heart and be honest with your feedback. 

 And lastly, research has shown that to keep an team member happy, you need to give positive feedback three times as much as negative feedback.

 “How to Give Performance Feedback to Team Members” is written to help managers giving feedback to employees and can be used by anyone to improve the feedback that they give.

How to increase accountability in my team is a question that I have been asked many times by clients, team members and colleagues. 

In this podcast, I explain why many managers find holding team members to account difficult and go through what you should do to make increasing accountability in your team much easier. 

 The benefits you get of increasing accountability in your team in terms of team performance and team morale far outweigh the work to increase accountability. Increasing accountability makes managing teams a lot easier and is an essential step in creating high performing teams. 

 How to increase accountability in a team is one of the essential skills of leadership and team management. I take you through my experiences and what has worked for me in many businesses include business turnaround and high growth business were team accountability is vital. 

 “How to Increase Accountability in My Team” has 6 key actions for you to take for creating and increasing accountability. Each will help you create the foundations to improve employee engagement, the team culture and team performance. 

 Setting expectations clearly and then following-up regularly are probably the two actions that are practiced the least by new and junior managers, yet both are vital to creating an accountability culture within your team. 

 I have had to take a team with very low team morale, with low accountability, in a failing business and turn around their performance and morale to deliver results to ensure the company did not fail. I used exactly the steps I go through in this podcast to achieve a dramatic team and business turnaround. 

 Use the tips and examples within this podcast to improve your management skills and leadership skills and enjoy managing and leading your team! 

How to hire a successful team is a critical task for any manager or leader in a growing business. As a manager of a team your performance is closed linked to the performance of your team. Hiring the right team members can make or break a team.  

 In this Podcast “How to Hire a Successful Team - 7 Tips for Getting it Right”, I share my best tips of how to hire the right people for your team to help you deliver great team performance with a team you love working with. 

 When creating a high-performing teams, learning how to hire good employees that have a good cultural fit with existing team members is so important. The team will be more effective, will work together better and deliver great results.

 We share tried and tested advice for hiring managers when thinking about how to hire employees. Build a team in the right way, and your job as a leader or manager will be so much more enjoyable and easier. 

 Looking at the statistics, having the wrong team members is one of the top three reasons for new business failures. And if you think larger businesses can escape poor hires, think again. The quality of the team impacts decisions at all levels. The more senior the decision maker, the larger the impact of those decisions. Plenty of large businesses fail because of poor decisions

 If you listen to interviews or talks with the likes of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or in fact any leader from any growing business,  one of the first things they talk about is how they go about hiring the right people to create a high-performance team.

 We know that many managers and companies do an amazing job of hiring their staff. There are many more companies that do not do a great job because they have not taken the right steps to set themselves up for success.

Hiring the right people into your business or team is a critical activity for any growing company. Make sure you spend enough time setting up how you are going to hire well.

How to manage expectations at work are essential skills to learn and improve no matter what you do. Use these 5 tried and trusted steps do a brilliant job of setting expectations at work.

Set and manage expectations well and you will be:

1.            Easier to work with

2.            Colleagues will like you more because you don’t let them down 

3.            You are perceived as 

                 a.            more professional

                  b.            a team player

                 c.            better at your job

4.            And you are more likely to be promoted.

 Set expectations is common piece of advice for nearly any office worker, yet not many managers or colleagues take you through how to do this effectively. 

 As a result, many staff and managers are not effective at setting or managing of those they work with – their colleagues, manager, team members and other stakeholders. 

 Practice these 5 steps at work and build your confidence and your skill in managing expectations. Your happiness, stress levels and career will all thank you for it.

 Setting expectations as a manager or leader is challenging because you have more moving parts and more peoples’ expectations to manage. 

 These 5 steps are super useful in how to set expectations with your boss and with setting expectations with employees. 

 Everyone likes to work with a person that sets and manages expectations and then delivers against those expectations time and time again. Work at your expectation management skills and it won’t take you long to be in these shoes.

How to Motivate a Team is a question many managers and leaders ask. In this video I take you through 10 tried and tested actions you should take to motivate your team.

I always felt that the more that I could do to improve the team, to train and coach them and get them thinking and involved in decisions then their motivation would increase, and this would encourage them to perform at their best. When this happens, everyone is a winner – the individuals, the manager, and the business.

How do you motivate your team?

There are many ways to motivate your team at work – it is important that you try different approaches that work with your style of management. Being genuine and authentic is a very important starting point. 

Motivate your team as a leader by setting direction and goals. This gets everyone moving in a similar direction and is pretty essential if you want to achieve a lot and achieve the right results. I take you through practical tips on how to motivate a team to achieve results. By setting expectations and creating a plan of how each person can achieve the results, the team is well placed to deliver. 

Another key action to take to motivate your team members is to say no and protect the team. I always appreciated a manager or leader who would look after the team and ensure that everyone had the best chance to do their work well.
 
And finally, positive reinforcement works so much better than criticising work not done as well. Find out how often you should complement staff vs criticise if you want to keep them happy – it is more than you think.

Enjoy leading and motivating your team!

How to Develop Your Best Team Members take you through 9 actions that you should take to get the most from your best team members and keeping them within your team.  

How to develop your best team members is a pretty tough challenge as a manager. So if you are lucky enough to have one or more star performers on your team, how do you go about managing and developing them? 

There are lots of options available, as I share lots of tips from my 25 years of managing and leading teams, in corporates and household names through to SMEs.  

Keeping your star performers is a key team management goal and providing personal development to each team member is one of the best staff retention strategies I know. I view team development as one of key team management skills to learn.

Get more from your team by going through each of the 9 actions I recommend you consider implementing soon. Support the development of all team members and encourage them to develop their skills. I have found this a great way to motivate employees and get the best out of them.

Your best staff members will want responsibility and autonomy. I take you the Do’s and Don’t’s of giving responsibility and autonomy to your team members, giving you practical tips of how to do this. 

Spend a portion of your time coaching and mentoring your direct reports to pass on your knowledge and expertise and develop problem solving skills in your team.

In “How to Motivate Teams Through Change” I take you through 8 factors - that if you get right – make a huge difference in motivating teams through change (and are very useful in day to day management)

Interviews are competitive - sometimes very competitive – so the right preparation is a must if you want to get that job offer. And the higher up the career ladder you do, the competition gets tougher because there are less jobs and the competition is better and just like you.  

In this podcast, I talk about how much preparation you should do for professional level jobs and above, the four key factors that will decide if you pass or fail, and I give you nine key tips for preparing for your interview. 

And for more tips and help for winning job offers, visit our website: https://enhance.training/

Why should you improve interview technique may seem like a no-brainer to some of you thinking about getting a new job. And to others you might be asking how my does interview technique really matter – surely I will get a job based on my skills, experience and attitude not how brilliantly I answers questions. 

Which approach is right?

In this podcast we set out 9 key factors that go into interview technique, how much interview technique really matters in an interview and at the end of the podcast we give you three options on how to improve your techniques. 

In this podcast we take you through competitive pricing and we show you why copying isn’t always the best answer.

When you don’t know how to price your product, it is tempting to look at the competition and use their prices as a basis for yours. But what happens if you end up copying the wrong answer? Or what happens if your competition reacts to your price; what should you do then?

 It is said that ‘Pricing is either your most powerful weapon or your worst enemy.’ 

 We have created this product pricing series to provide tips to help you make pricing work for you and certainly not be your enemy! In this second episode we look at what competitive pricing is, who uses it, why it’s great and not forgetting those all-important watch outs too. You will soon be in a better position to price your product. 

In this podcast we take you through the method that 80% of businesses use as part of their product pricing. Cost plus pricing. It is one of the founding pricing methods but is it too basic or can it still be key to business success?

 It is said that ‘Pricing is either your most powerful weapon or your worst enemy.’ 

 We have created this product pricing series to provide tips to help you make pricing work for you and certainly not be your enemy! In this first episode we look at what cost plus pricing is, who uses it, why it’s great and not forgetting those all-important watch outs too. You will be in a better position to price your product. 

Succession Planning is absolutely in your interests if you are a business owner or a person seeking promotion. 

 It can also be very useful to attract and retain great employees, increase the value and performance of a business and reduce the stress when one of your team moves on. 

 Find out why in this video as we share tips on how to set up effective business planning and discuss why many people worry about putting succession planning in place. 

Working capital – what is it and why should I care about it? 

Working capital is the biggest investment most businesses make, sometimes without realising it. Don’t manage your working capital well, and your business could fail. 

In this podcast we  explain exactly what working capital is using every day language and share some simple examples. 

Working capital is an a essential part of running any business from start ups to global corporates.  Listen to our podcast to find out why.

We take you through how to create a great answer to “What are your strengths”, the classic interview question. 

This question or a variation is expected by all interview candidates, so to beat your competition you need a better answer than they give. 

We provide lots of tips for you to decide on your strengths, we talk through what the interviewer is looking for and provide example answers