A Better Approach to Problem Solving

As the manager of a team, it’s important for you to learn about your team members’ skills, abilities, and personalities.  By also learning about their individual work styles you’ll be better able to put staff in roles where they can be most helpful to the team and successful for themselves.

One of the challenges for great leaders is to help their staff members achieve more than they thought they could.  This can be a relaxed partnership with high achievers but a difficult, knock-down, struggle with others on your team.  Helping staff achieve at their highest level is the subject of this episode.

Managers are under more pressure than ever.  They now report daily stress levels that are greater than the employees they lead, driven by role overload and their lack of control over work demands.  The best skills to use when under pressure is the subject of this episode.

The traditional use of power and authority has been to exercise strict control over others. However, that’s often not the best strategy.  More often, a better route is to go beyond exercising control to mobilizing others’ energy and commitment.  That’s the focus of this episode.

When skilled leaders meet with their staff members and ask, “What’s keeping you from being more productive?” The answer they often hear is about unnecessary rules, policies, and procedures that have long outlived their usefulness.  That’s the subject of this episode.

When an employee fails, managers usually don’t blame themselves.  Whatever the actual reason may be, the problem is assumed to be the employee’s fault and the employee’s responsibility.  But, what if the manager has also contributed to the poor performance?  That’s the focus of this week's episode.

In this episode we discuss both types of communicating: one-on-one and with groups.  HOW something is communicated is as important as WHAT is being communicated.

Communication skills, the ability to prepare, interact, and understand messages, are among the most important skills and abilities any leader must have to be successful. Preparation for communicating with one or more people is the focus of this episode.

The leader’s role is to build and maintain a high-performing team that outperforms the competition.  In a past episode we discussed EQ, the first of the core skills and abilities to be a successful leader.  In this episode we will discuss Relationship Building, another critical skill.

Whether you’re a new, or experienced, manager you’ll face problems at work.  The way that you approach solving them will prove to be an important aspect of your success.  In this encore episode we’ll discuss a good process to follow.