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Ttoo often, when hands-on managers get involved in doing work they behave in ways that can limit their team’s learning. They jump into the fray, heads down, and plow through the work like the individual contributors they used to be. Or worse, they become micromanagers who encourage boss-dependence.


What’s needed is for these hands-on managers to first learn how to think differently about their dual roles as both players and managers. Instead of being held back by orthodox management thinking that encourages managers to think in terms of “either I’m leading my team or I’m doing work,” these hands-on managers need to shift their thinking about workforce development to a mindset that says “I can do work and do it in ways that accelerate learning for my team members.” Then leading and doing become mutually reinforcing, ongoing activities.

Once hands-on managers adopt this “both/and” mindset, they can begin to recognize the many opportunities they have to create a learning culture while working with their team members. But the key to taking full advantage of these opportunities is for hands-on leaders to learn some trainable skills.

Let me first clarify what I mean by saying "get out of the way." I am not referring to being a passive leader nor am I saying that any good leader should be less visible. Quite the opposite. Being present and getting your hands dirty is part of the job. But there is a fine balance.

Working alongside the team in the trenches at times is important, but a high performance team must be empowered, nimble and adaptive. This is hard to accomplish when micro-managers are breathing down their necks all day. That's not a sound leadership strategy anyway and it won't lead to improving speed, efficiency or morale.

Life isn’t linear. No matter how well thought out your plans, they’ll eventually collide with a reality you didn’t plan on. Learning to "lean into the curves" when life doesn’t unfold as you’d hoped will help spare you untold stress, bounce back faster and emerge better off.  Here’s five ways to do just that.

Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor, Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, knows it can be painful to be a boss, especially when you have to fire someone.  Getting fired is painful, even traumatic.  It can cause financial hardship and damage a person’s self-confidence.  Scott knows the power of asking the right questions when making a tough decision like this.

She recalls having to fire an employee who wasn’t performing as expected and whom she liked personally.  She was nervous when the meeting started.  Then it got worse.  After she said he had to leave the company, this soon-to-be former team member, asked “Why? You never told me I wasn’t measuring up.”

Scott who has managed teams at Google, Apple and Silicon Valley startups, realized he was right.  Why hadn’t she told him?

Don’t let your impatience turn into passive aggression. Here are four productive steps to take instead.

You work hard to provide essential information to employees about key topics like company direction, benefits and business results:

But despite these important internal communication efforts, you may be missing one of the most effective ways to get employees' attention. That channel? Workplace communication methods like posters, bulletin boards, digital screens and banners.

Visionary leadership and great management achieves the best results. Seems obvious right? Then why do so many companies get it wrong, especially during times of needed change?

There are core fundamental differences between leadership and management that apply to any team or organization, but the focus of this article is to explore the strengths of each as they apply to leading organizational change.

Generally speaking, management is a set of systems and processes designed for organizing, budgeting, staffing and problem solving to achieve the desired results of an organization. Leadership defines the vision, mission and what the "win" looks like in the future. It inspires the team to embody the beliefs and behaviors necessary to take the actions needed to achieve those results.

The most successful transformations occur when strong visionary leadership converges with great management. Both are required to define a clear path, plan accordingly and see the mission plan through to fulfillment.

I have been writing a series of articles on culture-enabled organizational transformation. Much of my philosophies on this subject are derived from learnings on the battlefield as a Navy SEAL, and in the boardroom as an entrepreneur. There are three phases to my transformation model, each with several components: building the change culture, preparing for the change battle, and winning the change fight.

Once a company is well-prepared for change and high levels of trust and accountability have been woven into the fabric of the organization's culture, only then can they start preparing for the change battle. Behaviors and mindsets must adapt and a plan of attack developed and communicated. The first phase of winning the change fight is to empower the team and enlist as much participation as possible at all levels.

Great teams are led by great leaders, and great leaders all share traits that are absolutely essential to their ability to lead. These are the 5 most important traits leaders have - if you're a leader, they will transform the way you lead for mind-blowingly rewarding results.

For decades, the dominant view among psychologists was that constraints served as a barrier to creativity. Anybody who spends a short time working under a confining bureaucracy, dealing with a micromanaging boss, or sitting in a classroom that teaches to the test can grasp the appeal of this argument. But it isn’t the whole story.

Patricia Stokes is a Columbia University psychologist and an expert in the science of creativity. In one experiment she conducted back in 1993, rodents were forced to press a bar with only their right paws. Eventually, they not only learned to adapt to that constraint, but they figured out how to press the bar in more ways than a group that had free use of their limbs. This has come to be called "little ‘c’ creativity"—a form of creativity not focused on producing creative works but rather on solving practical problems through new uses and applications of resources. And it’s this form of creativity that tends to get short shrift.

For fifty or sixty years job-seekers have been taught to write their resumes in the most opaque and unhelpful way imaginable.

Job-seekers have been taught to use terse, governmental language in their resumes, so that almost every job-seeker sounds identical to every other job-seeker!

That's the worst possible approach. You are not a dry, dusty person — you are lively and creative! Why not show some of that creativity and spark in your resume?

Remember back when “VUCA” (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) only really applied to companies? Those were the days, huh? Lately, with geopolitical discord abroad, political tensions here at home in the U.S., and all manner of policy shifts that could impact U.S. businesses, plenty of entrepreneurs may be wishing for steadier leadership. I know I am.

Email is taking a lot of flak lately. And why not? We're inundated with it. It's cold and impersonal. People abuse it passive-aggressively for their own political agendas. And it can be --to be frank -- addictive.

Yet, no matter how much we gripe about it, and whatever options may be out there like Slack, email is here to stay. For now, at least.

But we can all do email better. Much better. I've been witness to --and often the victim of --a range of email offenses in my working life. And yet, even today, I see people continue to commit the same email offenses that I thought would have become forgotten or even outlawed by now.

So in the interest of raising awareness around these offenses, and with the hope that we can see them committed far less frequently, here are five difficult and uncomfortable things that you should never, ever put into your emails at work. Especially if want to build --and keep -- the relationships that matter to you most.

The first few days at a new job should be exciting and scary, kind of like doing the tango. Instead, it's often spent learning the Human Resources shuffle, a dance involving your hands, lots of paperwork, and quick trots between administrative offices. Often, paperwork takes all day to complete. That's an automatic enthusiasm-dampener. It doesn't have to be this way. Here's what hiring managers can do to expedite this process, improve productivity, and, as a bonus, even increase employee retention: digital onboarding.

Digital onboarding replaces the traditional onboarding paperwork process with technology. Documents such as offer letters, I-9s, W-4s, and employee handbooks can be issued and electronically signed online.

After looking at thousands of new hires from Workpop's hiring platform, we learned that when companies utilize digital onboarding, over 65 percent of new hires electronically signed their new-hire documents within a day of receiving them, while 90 percent completed the process by the end of one week.

Here's why digital onboarding can be financially rewarding: the documents can be signed at the employee's leisure, even prior to the first day of employment, instead of having to spend all or part of the first shift doing it.

In any fast growing company, it's natural that conflict arises. It holds true at just about any company -- every type, every stage. Doesn't matter what market or size.

You'll see it happen most between functional areas. Sometimes marketing and operations will be at odds. Sometimes, it's marketing and sales, or sales and finance. Technology may want to go one direction, marketing another. Finance might lean too conservative.

It's why it's super important for your leadership team to have strong interpersonal skills and interactions. You can't rely on hiring great people alone. You also need to set the pace for solid interactions, help create and foster them. Nurture it at every turn.

We accomplish it a few ways at my company.

John Lee Dumas has interviewed more than 1,500 inspiring entrepreneurs as the host of the EOFire podcast, and has successfully launched two action-oriented books on productivity; "The Freedom Journal," which walks you through accomplishing a single goal in 100 days, and now "The Mastery Journal," a "step-by-step guide to mastering productivity, discipline & focus in 100 days."

I asked JLD to share his top five tips, tricks and habits for being your most productive self each and every day.

You work hard to provide essential information to employees about key topics like company direction, benefits and business results:

But despite these important internal communication efforts, you may be missing one of the most effective ways to get employees' attention. That channel? Workplace communication methods like posters, bulletin boards, digital screens and banners.

Many of these enthusiasts would later use what they’d learned in bicycle workshops to create greater transportation breakthroughs. Both of the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. So was a man named Henry Ford, who watched mass production take hold at a time when cyclists began lobbying for better roads to be built. Before long, thanks to him, the modern automobile was ambling down them.

As an organization grows, managing the flow demands work items to move from one team/department to another. In quest to make these teams accountable, very specific KPI’s are established and that breeds non-systemic thinking. People look at meeting their own numbers and push the work to next stage

Whether you're managing an intern or running an entire business, your employees' success (and your own skin) depends on your leadership.

Thankfully, the solution for motivating your team and squashing any issues is right at the tip of your tongue. It all starts with communication -- the skill experts point to as the make-or-break factor for successful leadership.

Here are eight things that exceptional bosses tell their employees daily. Start using these daily (or begin looking for a boss who does), and watch your success skyrocket:

Maybe you've been at your job for just a few months. Maybe you've been there for a few years. Either way, once you slip into a comfortable routine, it's easy to take your foot off the gas without realizing it.

You might not be coasting through the work you do. Perhaps you're even digging into your latest project really intensely—and that's a good thing. But it only increases the chances that you may be neglecting your relationships around the office, starting with your boss.

Now that the adjustment period after the holidays—aka "January"—is behind you, it's time to take a fresh look at how you've been interacting with your boss to see if you can invigorate your relationship. As career coaches are always saying, you need to make yourself indispensable, not just reliable; "satisfactory" never got anybody promoted.

Here are four things you can do to right now to remind your boss why they just can’t live without you.