Why subscribe?
Good Management Practices is work-related content, so you can bill for the time you spend reading it, and expense the paid subscription.
Effective management is really just observing, tracking, and solving problems for the people you manage so they can work better. Managing people well consists of using regular practices to communicate, track, and use information to make working more direct and engaging for everyone. It's only magic when you do it regularly.
The paid subscription is membership access to a monthly online workshop in which I lead you through creating managing strategy and processes for your own situation. It’s perfect for managers, HR people, and anyone who supports managers. There’s a group discount for the workshop membership paid subscription, so HR leaders can either subscribe themselves and then put the planning into action, or buy memberships for the managers they support and work with them to participate in the workshops.
The paid subscription workshop schedule for 2024 is:
January: What's the main task of managing for your team? Teaching, directing, facilitating, protecting, documenting, or something else. The manager's role for any given team in any given organization varies, and you can be doing a great job doing one thing but if it's not what your team needs, you can be doing the best job poossible and still fail. Come to this session to learn how to identify what the main task(s) are for your team inside your org.
January 25, Thursday, 8 am PST, 11 am EST, 4 pm GMT
February: Managing well runs on dopamine, not adrenaline. Popular culture tells us the opposite. Come to this session to learn how to reorient your view of what managing is supposed to feel like and how managing well uses less energy than managing poorly-but-dramatically does, and how to build in practices for yourself as a manager that reward staying on track.
February 22, Thursday, 8 am PST, 11 am EST, 4 pm GMT
March: Communication is the core function of an effective team. Set up communications processes so nothing falls through the cracks and your team builds in the routine of transparency and cooperation. Come to this session to find out how to set up direct processes to keep track of and make use of the information that otherwise wouldn't have a place to be until it causes a crisis.
March 28, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 3 pm GMT
April: Run a one-on-one weekly session with each of your team members. Managers are all supposed to do these (allegedly)! No one is taught how to do them effectively! They can be a dreaded waste of time! Running an effective one-on-one is not hard at all, but it's a process, so come to this session and learn how to create a solid, simple agenda for a one-on-one that you won't dread.
April 25, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 4 pm BST
May: The manager creates the culture and sets the tone of the entire team. Come to this session to learn how to figure out what you want the culture and tone of your team to be within your larger organization, and how to create what you want and make it psychologically safe for your team members.
May 23, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 4 pm BST
June: Undermanaging happens when you don't know or recognize that you're the one who has to take charge of a situation or team, and it can destroy trust and cause people to leave your team. Come to this session to recognize undermanaging in yourself or other managers and create a plan to wean yourself onto healthier managing behaviors that create team cohesiveness.
June 27, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 4 pm BST
July: Overmanaging and micromanaging happen when people don't trust their own management skills and processes and manage out of fear. It's a vicious circle because it creates incentives for team members to detach from managers and the entire job, andeventually quit entirely. Come to this session to learn how to create structures and feeback loops that allow you to engage in healthier managing behaviors that will keep your team members engaged and satisfied.
July 25, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 4 pm BST
August: Read the room and set up processes and policies for success, including not undoing a whole year of good will in the last month of the year. The choices the manager makes about logistics, policies, and actions can guide team members into effective, prosocial behaviors or into chaos and obstruction. Come to this session to learn how to create work processes that channel people into better behavior and morale.
August 22, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 4 pm BST
September: You as part of the ecosystem of your organization. It's really easy to tell people to "manage up," but to be able to do that effectively you have to be able to tell where you and your team are in the entire organizational ecosystem, and what advocating for yourself and your team mean in context. Come to this session to learn how to assess where you are and how you're seen in your org, and to make a plan for advocating for yourself and your team and a whole and individually.
September 26, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 4 pm BST
October: Set up the new year with your team. What if everyone on your team was ready to jump in in January, excited about being back at work, feeling energized by new projects and goals and satisfied by progress on existing projects? Come to this session to learn how to manage the planning process with your team so well that they take ownership and share leadership of the new year of working together.
October 24, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 4 pm BST
November: Problem solving. It's the nature of work that things will go wrong or tasks won't be what you assumed they'd be. Come to this session to learn how to set up a standardized process of problem solving for and in your team so that you can use all the other processes you've been using to assess the situation and cooperate to knock out the problem.
November 21, Thursday, 8 am PST, 11 am EST, 4 pm GMT
December: Create an operations manual. Once you're on a regular communication schedule with your team, the majority of the problems you'll have are because there are gaps in your workflow that no one's awware of and that don't have owners. Creating an operations manual for your team will fix all that. Come to this session to find out how to create a comprehensive, accurate flow for your entire team and turn that into an operations manual and use that to eliminate obstacles and unforced errors.
December 19, Thursday, 8 am PST, 11 am EST, 4 pm GMT
January 2025: Reward efficiency and engagement, for real. It's an easy trap to fall into: One or ore of your team members are just faster and better at the weird little stuff no one wants to do, so you give them more of that work. Unfortunately, that's the fastest way to demoralize good workers and push them into quiet quitting. Come to this session to learn how to harness people's incidental skills for the good of the team while not "rewarding" them with more grunt work, and give actual rewards for working smarter.
January 23, Thursday, 8 am PST, 11 am EST, 4 pm GMT
February 2025: What's the sweet spot of how much your people should be working? What's the sweet spot of how much YOU should be working? There's absolutely a sweet spot above which more work isn't going to be of more value. Come to this session to learn how to assess if the demands of any given role (yours included) are too big for one fulltime employee and how to mitigate that if it turns out to be the case. It'll help a ton if you're already familiar with creating an operations manual, even if you haven't actually created one yet.
February 27, Thursday, 8 am PST, 11 am EST, 4 pm GMT
March 2025: Managing bad actors. At one time or another, unless you get to hire everyone in your organization and you have flawless instincts, you’ll have to deal with someone harming you or your team members. It can be tempting to attempt to placate this person to keep the peace, but this never works out in the long run, and you’re obligated by ethics to protect your team. Come to this session to find out how to manage people who are harming others, whether the bad actor is on your team or not.
March 27, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 3 pm GMT
April 2025: New hiring fundamentals. Whether you’ve been hiring people for years, or will be hiring you first person in the future, you need to know that the job market has changed so radically since the pandemic that the ways you were accessing good candidates and hiring strong people has changed. Come to this session to talk about what’s changed and how you can access the right candidates for the positions you are hiring for, and bring them into your organization with excitement and anticipation.
April 24, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 4 pm BST
May 2025: Onboarding to your team. Whether your organization has a solid onboarding process for new hires or not, you can create a great process for your team that ensures that new hires stay excited and ready to be part of what you’ve created.
May 22, Thursday, 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 4 pm BST
You'll come out of every workshop with some strategy and tactics specific to your situation, and with actual next steps to do the next day when you log in or show up to work.
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