Running a business may have been your life’s dream. Being your own boss, making the decisions, and seeing your vision come to life is exciting and satisfying to say the least. However, properly growing a company can be challenging no matter how solid your product or service is. Maybe you need help with setting up the framework of fledgling departments, creating social posts for a major campaign, or meeting an unexpected client need.
If you’re a leader, you’ve hit a “leadership roadblock” at some point: Whether you’ve been in leadership for a long time or have just recently transitioned into a leadership role, leadership walls or roadblocks happen to everyone eventually. As one of the four key functions of management, leadership is an integral part of every manager’s job. Leading well requires finding new tactics and strategies to overcome even the most complex leadership challenges.
Remote work is growing at a rapid pace. According to the latest research from McKinsey & Company, 58% of the U.S. workforce has the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week, while 35% have the option five days a week. This data holds true across all industries and job types, including both “blue collar” and “white collar” jobs that traditionally required on-site work.
How you lead and interact with your team can be a balancing act even on a good day. It’s no surprise when there are so many factors at play. Some management styles may be more effective for particular team members, departments, or workplace cultures. Others may come naturally to you based on your personality, talents, or industry experience. Whichever approach you lean toward, it’s worth understanding all the common management styles.
Whether we like it or not, a recession is brewing. You may wish you could bury your head in the sand and wait for it to pass, but the best thing you can do as an agency owner is to take deliberate action and create a plan to protect your business now. This way even if you can’t completely shelter your agency from the impact of a recession, you can stay profitable and avoid a total wipe-out.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could be as productive as possible without causing burnout? We call it “working smarter, not harder.” Among many working professionals, working smart is a key to greater productivity. It can save you time and energy for the things that matter, like your life goals, personal growth and health, and relationships. The fact applies at work, too: Working smarter at the office keeps team members engaged and less overwhelmed.
In today’s project-driven business landscape, project managers are an indispensable part of completing projects successfully. But a closely related and equally important discipline receives much less attention: project leadership. Maybe it’s because one is a fairly standard job title and the other isn’t.
You can’t fix what you can’t measure. (You can’t bill for it very well, either.) That’s the key principle behind employee time tracking. It helps managers and organizations understand how long it takes, on average, to complete various tasks, aiding in the baselining and project scheduling processes. But doing this in a way that generates the data you need without feeling like micromanaging can be a challenge. Time-tracking software is a compelling solution.
What makes a great leader? When Chris Hadfield was commanding the International Space Station, he learned that it’s not about seeking out individual greatness to make yourself look good. Instead, he found that excellent leadership is about building up the people around you: trusting them, empowering them, and ultimately, enabling them to contribute their expertise so that the team can become more than the sum of its parts.
OKRs can be a powerful tool in an organization’s arsenal for creating alignment, focusing on outcomes instead of just effort or task completions, and surfacing the right operational priorities. They’re just as powerful within departments and teams, and it’s in this latter area that project managers often start to get involved in the OKR process. But what about using OKRs within the project management discipline?
