Online Career Tips

By Peggy Drexler, Forbes.com
Special to Online Career Tips

Katie worked at an events planning company, helping her boss design and execute some of the city’s biggest and most important parties, weddings, and fundraisers. She was good at her job—creative and organized—and she’d been promoted from intern to assistant to full-on planner in less than six months. When it came to crises, she’d proven she could handle most anything.

Which is why Katie was constantly baffled by her boss’s insistence on hovering over her every move. “She wanted the minutes of every single client meeting, every single phone call,” Katie told me. “She wanted to know not only the solutions I’d come up with to problems, but the thought processes that led to those solutions. Everything took twice as long.” Like many hyper-controlling managers, Katie’s was working all the time—and expected Katie to do the same. “When she texted me at midnight, she wanted to know why I didn’t text her back for seven hours,” Katie recalled. “And when I’d tell her it was because I was sleeping, she seemed suspicious, and annoyed!”

By Paul B. Brown, Forbes.com
Special to Online Career Tips

The short answer to the implicit question in the headline is this: You are going to have to think differently about how you perform your job, if you want to foster entrepreneurial thought and action inside your organization.

To show just how much you have to change, consider four elements of a good management:

Interview with Dr. Charlie Bindig
Senior Manager of Educational Outreach, American Public University

Creating a productive and secure environment for your employees is paramount to your overall success. In education it’s important to build trust with the staff in order to accomplish the overall goal of educating the students. As an organization you need to focus on hiring and maintaining positive leaders. How you tailor your leadership style toward your staff will have some of the biggest impact on their productivity. To talk about leadership styles more is Dr. Charlie Bindig. In this podcast he explains the importance of servant leadership, and how to tailor your current style to better flow with your staff.

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By Ramesh Ramakrishnan, Business2Community.com
Special to Online Career Tips

The Need for Network Leadership

The movie Titanic left a lasting memory about ‘change’ in my mind. Though the Titanic accident happened over 100 years ago, the key message of change still rings true to this day.

After receiving six alerts about ice bergs, with radio relay problems (the message didn’t reach the captain) and the last-minute spotting of the ice berg from the crows nest on the ship, Titanic couldn’t carry out a course-correction in time to avoid the iceberg.

The issue was not its speed or size. Key people didn’t listen, communicate and act in time. These types of communication breakdowns still persist today.

By Jeanne Meister, Forbes.com
Special to Online Career Tips

If you haven’t disclosed the details of a drinking binge, blasted music from your cubicle, or taken a mid-meeting nap at work recently, then you’re in better shape than many of the employees at a Fortune 500 healthcare company, where lately some business unit managers have asked the HR department for help teaching what they refer to as Millennial workplace etiquette.

In fact, they are asking for books, training programs, videos, anything to orient Millennial employees to the norms and culture of an organization.

By Victor Lipman, Forbes.com
Special to Online Career Tips

While most everyone in business would agree that delegation is critical to managerial success, how often are we dissatisfied with the results of what we’ve delegated? How often is the “product” that is returned to us not exactly what we’d hoped for? While this is sometimes the fault of the person of completing the assignment, it’s often the fault of the person giving the assignment. And there’s a common root to the problem.

One word, I believe, sums it up: clarity. (Or lack thereof.) While those executing an assignment have the responsibility to deliver a professional product, those making the assignment have the responsibility to ensure that the assignment is, as an old editor of mine used to put it, “clear as a mountain crick.”

By Brent Webber
Faculty Member, Business Administration at American Public University

Working in a management capacity for a publicly traded company can be a very rewarding and challenging position. Your overall success and ultimate advancement largely hinges on your ability to analyze data, interpret public filings, and implement executive directives that are often disclosed in annual reports, 10-Ks and 10-Qs. Analytics is paramount to your daily duties and how you manage your employees.

Fundamentally speaking, analytics is the process of evaluating patterns of data to make efficient business decisions. However, analytics can mean different things in different industries and situations. As a comparison, risk management could mean transfer of risk via an insurance contract or it could mean hedging via a derivative contract. Minimizing risk in a financial portfolio, pegging oil costs, or limiting exposure to the increase in wheat prices are vastly different skills than understanding the transfer of risk via an insurance contract.

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By Victor Lipman, Forbes.com
Special to Online Career Tips

I say “surprising” in the title because common decency is not one of the qualities that often comes to mind when we think of the tools management has at its disposal. Yet over the years in management I observed its power on many occasions. Employees who were treated decently and respectfully were much more apt to “go the extra mile” for their managers than those who were not. Common decency thus made good managerial sense not because managers wanted to be nice – but because it was effective.

Management of course is all about achieving results through others, so it’s only logical people want to do more for those they are favorably disposed to. Yet they can become accustomed to working for “bosses” who routinely overstep their authority and treat subordinates with something less than the respect they would wish for themselves. So, depending on the company and managerial culture, it may almost come as a pleasant motivating surprise to be treated thoughtfully, as an equal, albeit in a subordinate organizational role.