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6 Ways to Be a Great Boss

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StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article |Ways to be a great boss|6 Ways to Be a Great BossStudies show that 82 percent of employees consider quitting because of a bad leader. Many people will opt for a new boss over a pay raise from a bad one. So, you can guess how high the expectations are if you want to lead a business or a small team. It takes a lot of time and a great deal of experience. Therefore, learning from other successful business leaders is the only way to improve your chances of becoming a great boss. On that note, here are a few ways to be a great boss.

Make Employees a Priority

What makes a great company? You can talk of a great product, loyal customers, effective processes, and many other essential business must-haves. If you bundle all these together, you’ll realize that a huge part of achieving this rest on the quality and quantity of employees you have in your workforce.

As a business owner, it’s curial not to lose fact of the importance of your employees and ensure their sacrifices are significantly appreciated. There are various ways to prioritize your employees. Most importantly, ensure your employees have what they want to work better and more efficiently. Great bosses listen to their employees and invest in solutions that work best for all of them.

Solutions can range from spreading work across so you don’t overburden and underpay workers, to securing vehicles so employees can move about freely. In situations concerning the latter, companies like The Minibus Centre can help you short out all your short to long-term car leasing arrangements.

Be a Problem Solver

A great boss leads the charge in converting the toughest problems into solutions. On the other hand, in the face of problems, average bosses tend to only shift blame. Becoming the former begins with a mindset to conceptualize problems as a conduit to identify sustainable solutions for your business. Problem-solving doesn’t mean always starting from another level.

As a great boss, you must focus on continuous improvement rather than solving a problem, waiting for the same problem to come up again, and repeating the process. Continuous improvement involves helping great bosses minimize wasteful operations and prove their yield.


Delegate

There is a misconception about delegation that many bad bosses run with, which dampens employees’ morale. As a boss, delegating doesn’t mean outsourcing tasks and cutting yourself from the process only to demand results and harshly criticize employees. The difference between a good and a bad boss is inherent in their relationship with team members.

For a bad boss, dealing with a team means staying outside, giving instructions, and criticizing efforts without empathy. Great bosses put themselves in the shoes of workers. They don’t estrange themselves from the team. Through effective and consistent communication ensures team members are always on the same page asking for regular progress updates.

Conducting frequent daily standup meetings can also be a great way to effectively communicate with your co-workers and ensure you’re all on the same page.

Give Constructive Feedback

Great bosses see operations as a continuous loop that never breaks. The process starts with identifying a problem but shouldn’t end after matching it with a solution. That’s where great bosses deploy monitoring and evaluation strategies to assess the process and provide constructive feedback to improve operations. As a great boss, you can communicate feedback using various methods. Experts advise making the communication swift, concise, and devoid of personal agenda.

Be Empathetic

Great business leaders are empathetic. Rather than shifting blames when employees go wrong, listen to your employees, understand their situations, and identify weaknesses. Empathy is vital in creating an enabling environment where employees feel empowered and appreciated.

Be Visible

Great bosses lead from the front and visible leaders appear more confident about their strategies and management efforts. These leaders inspire trust and drive teams to put up their best. For this reason, investing in your knowledge base is crucial for an effective leader. Learn as much as possible about business management, employee relationships, product management, marketing, etc.

All in all, becoming a boss is no easy task, but these tips, even though they are non-exhaustive, can help make things a little manageable.

Top Tips to Juggle Your Business Responsibilities

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Business Responsibilities|Top Tips to Juggle Your Business ResponsibilitiesAs a business owner, it is likely that you will be in charge of more than one element of your business and that you will have to oversee the rest of your business’s processes. Rather than always feeling flustered and disorganized, here are some of the best ways that you can juggle your business responsibilities in 2022.

Get Management Technology

Rather than try to juggle all of your responsibilities alone and remember every single task that you need to perform, you should use management technology. This technology has been specifically designed to help business leaders to better control what happens within their business. If you are a landlord or run a property business, you might decide to work with a property management company that uses the most modern technology, as this can help you to manage repairs and maintenance, find tenants, and handle fees and inspections. You will then be able to run your business flawlessly without constantly having to think about what task you need to complete next.

Delegate

A great business leader will be able to delegate certain tasks to other members of their team, rather than trying to do every single activity themselves. By loosening control on your business, you will be able to ensure that you can focus your full attention on the aspects which are important to you or which are your strengths, while allowing your employees to handle the elements of your business that are their forte. By doing this, you will be able to ensure that every single part of your business runs smoothly and simultaneously and that you do not have to run from place to place trying to do everything at once.

Stay Organized

There is nothing that can help you to juggle all of your business responsibilities more, though, than staying organized. Organization is key to your leadership strategy as it can allow you to feel in control at all times and to know exactly what is on your to-do list. Staying organized can also help you to handle tasks more quickly as you will not have to spend hours looking for the resources or paperwork that you need. So if you struggle to stay organized, you should invest in a good storage unit for your office, go entirely paperless, and consider downloading organization apps that may be able to help you.

Have a Plan

One of the top steps that you can take to juggle every single one of your business responsibilities, though, is to have a plan in place, whether this is only a plan for the day or one that encompasses a longer period. Having a plan will allow you to ascertain what task you need to do in what order and can ensure that you never feel that what you are doing is aimless or will not contribute to the success of your business. This will also ensure that every single person knows what they are meant to be doing at any given time.

5 Project Management Skills You Need To Have

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The Proof Of Fire

StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Project Management Skills|5 Project Management Skills You Need To HaveSometimes the only way to test something is through what’s known as a “trial by fire”. Now, that may not mean there’s actually a fire; it’s a turn of phrase that indicates extreme testing. A car designed to be safe if an accident causes a roll needs to be rolled. Crash test dummies exist owing to the need for a “trial by fire”, as it were, pertaining to associated safety features.

As a Project Manager or PM, your trial by fire is probably going to be whatever projects you’re working to complete. Each new project will be its own trial by fire, and that which is being put on metaphorical trial are your skills as a PM. Some projects are essentially impossible, while some PMs can’t even handle “softball” assignments.

Regardless of inherent management acumen, like exercise, PM skills can be improved. Part of that improvement involves following known best practices. Here are five skills that any PM should already be proficient in; and if you’re not, at minimum find ways of enhancing your abilities as regards the following.

1. Prioritization

Task priority is quite important. Product testing isn’t as high a priority as prototype development. If you don’t have something to test, how can you test it? So you need to know which steps are most important for which situation.
Determining such steps may well involve specifying a general outline for your project from beginning to end, and organizing efforts based on associated priority.

2. Effective Delegation Of Tasks

Tasks need to be delegated based not only on priority but based on the skill of employees to whom tasks are delegated. That means you need to know your team intimately enough to determine who will do a good job, and who can’t be trusted with certain responsibilities. Everyone has skills, and you want to delegate accordingly.

3. Self-Examination: External Testing Options Help

One of the most important things is to know your own efficacy as a PM. Some of your tasks will involve hands-on participation in a given project, while others will require you to be a more remote player in the production overall. Especially if you’re in a more remote role, a PMP practice exam can be very helpful in advance, as well as between varying projects.

4. Flexibility: Unexpected Circumstances Develop Regularly

You’ve got to be willing to “roll with the changes”, as that old REO Speedwagon song goes. Sometimes someone quits mid-project, sometimes management changes operational focus throughout a given company, sometimes budgets dry up, sometimes bad PR impacts project viability. Flexibility is absolutely paramount to managing such uncontrollable variables.

5. Perseverance: Some Projects Are Much Harder Than Others

You’ve got to be able to see things through. Your first project, if you’ve got a managerial staff of any quality, is going to be something you can handle. As you successfully handle varying products, you’ll be trusted with more complex work.

Certain projects may take years to complete, and that requires perseverance. A “bigger picture” perspective helps both initiate and foster necessary perseverance.

Optimizing Your Effectiveness As A Project Manager

Perseverance, flexibility, honest self-examination that incorporates external means of determination, task delegation, and prioritization all represent fundamental aspects of project management. If you’re in the position of PM for your company, you need to be sure your abilities incorporate such skills.

Certainly, these aspects of effective project management are stated in broad terms. However, that doesn’t mean they’re not fundamentally essential. Whatever your project is, as a manager you’re operating as a leader of sorts, and that means being able to juggle complex projects with skill over the long run.

Follow these Rules if you Want to Become a Successful Entrepreneur

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Successful Entrepreneur|Follow these Rules if you Want to Become a Successful EntrepreneurIf you are thinking about becoming a business owner, then you are probably wondering what it takes. After all, there is no cookie-cutter answer that applies to every single person. If you want to try and get a list of guidelines to follow that will cut down the chances of you experiencing failure, then the only thing that you need to do is look below.

Work Smarter and Not Harder

Most people see an entrepreneur as being someone who is able to work 18 hours a day and who does nothing other than eat, sleep and breathe business. Of course, hard work is certainly the key to success as an entrepreneur, but at the same time, working every minute of every day isn’t going to make you successful. Overworking will lead to you experiencing fatigue which will of course, lead to errors. Plus, it doesn’t matter how hard you work because you are never going to have the skills required to do everything. You have to learn how to work smarter and not harder because that is the key to success. If you want to help yourself, consider following influencers as they can help you to learn more about the world of business. Trimantium’s Phillip Kingston is always a good starting point.

Hire People to Handle Tasks

It’s a really simple process. You need to hire people who can do the things that you are not really good at. This gives you the chance to focus on the areas of your company that actually deliver the most value. Great entrepreneurs really do know how important delegation is, and even though it may be overwhelming at times, you have to make sure that you trust other people as much as possible. If you don’t, then you may find that your growth is stunted. There are tons of websites out there that you can use if you want some help with your growth.

Get More Done

Hiring freelancers might not be the best solution if you own an established company, but when you are in the early stages, freelancers and even third-party contractors can all be a very effective way for you to do business, and it won’t break the bank either. In fact, it can be very affordable. This all comes down to the supply and demand. This dynamic is generally reinforced by the fact that most freelancers are based overseas. The cost of living there is lower, and this helps your money to go further. This approach is very cost-friendly when you compare it to hiring a full-time employee, but make sure that you are actually getting more done by not micro-managing.

Don’t Be Afraid of Failure

Working smart and finding the right people will certainly go a long way, and it will help you to become more successful as an entrepreneur. The main thing that you have to remember is that there are no guarantees at all. You have to be realistic, and you also need to know that not every company succeeds. Sometimes there may be something wrong with the concept, or you may have competition that is tougher than you would have thought. The more you can make yourself aware of this, the better.

Overcoming Challenges within your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Business Challenges|Overcoming Challenges within your BusinessRunning your own business can be tough and challenging at the best of times. There are always obstacles and hurdles in your way. How you deal with problems and how you overcome challenges says a lot about your personality and about your leadership style. Tackling problems as soon as they happen and working out solutions is just what good business owners and leaders do. Here’s what to do to make sure you’re overcoming challenges effectively.

Facing problems head-on

Whether you run a bricks and mortar based business or an online-based business, you will have daily challenges and problems to overcome. These could be smaller problems like running out of office stationery, or they could be bigger problems such as sourcing last minute suppliers’ or making sure pallet rack protection is in place for your next delivery to ensure no goods get damaged when in transit. Whatever the problem, how you deal with it and overcome it will determine how successful you are within other areas of your business.

Seeing issues or problems through to completion is what needs to be done. Don’t be afraid to compromise to get the best solution for your business, but at the same time, don’t become a pushover – you will struggle to regain authority and respect.

Delegate and seek assistance

This may be easier said than done, especially if you have run the business from day zero, but remember that as an entrepreneur or small business owner, nobody is expecting you to do everything. To succeed in business, you need to know when to delegate jobs and responsibilities to others. Trying to do too much all the time will lead to burnout, which is no good for you or your business. Never shy away from seeking assistance or help from friends, family, and possibly even freelancers.

Evaluate and learn from your actions

To move forward within your business and to push it to the dizzying heights of success that you deserve, you need to regularly evaluate your business and yourself. Take some time out to focus on what you have achieved since you started out, and ultimately, where you want to finish up. It is important not to be too harsh on yourself but to simply see where and how you could have done things differently in certain situations or scenarios. It is beneficial to utilise business consultants when evaluating where you are wanting to take your business next and deciding which direction to go in.

Consultants have a wealth of experience and can provide you with an in-depth growth and development plan which you can implement within your business and start working on as soon as possible.

There will always be challenges to overcome within a business, this is part of the fun which you thrive on and live for. Make use of networking both online and offline to meet like-minded business owners and entrepreneurs. When you are facing difficulties or facing other small business challenges, the people you met through networking will be your business support network, which you can rely on to help you continue picking things up and moving forwards.