How to Manage Your Boss

Managing your own boss sounds oxymoronic, at first. We often think about management as being a downstream action, with someone above managing you, and you managing those further down the chain. As it turns out, the most effective leaders do both: they take the responsibility of making sure tasks get…
VIEW FULL POST

How to Challenge Authority Respectfully

Unless you’re the business owner, president, or chief executive of your company, you always have someone higher up to answer to. After all, employees by definition are employed by someone else. And regardless of the kind of job you’re working, you’ve almost certainly experienced moments when you’ve disagreed with managerial…
VIEW FULL POST

What Does a Leader Really Do?

When we think about the importance of designing a great customer experience, it’s easy to get hyper-focused on the frontline staff. This makes sense because these employees are the ones with whom the customers will be interacting the most, whether they are the servers at restaurants, cashiers at retail stores,…
VIEW FULL POST

Understanding Tough Customers

For anyone who has worked face-to-face with customers, you know there are just some people out there who—to put it delicately—are difficult. They’re seemingly impossible to please, expecting near perfection from you and your products. Not only are these interactions stressful, but they can go wrong in a flash. To…
VIEW FULL POST

Principles for Great Management

Last blog, we discussed the qualities of great leadership, the personality traits someone has to either possess or develop to be effective at managing others. Today, let’s add some principles to these qualities. For inspiration, we’ll refer to an article at RunningRestaurants.com, which is geared towards restaurant management. As always,…
VIEW FULL POST

Leadership Qualities

As a business owner or general manager, one of your most important tasks is delegation. On its face, delegation sounds like the opposite, like you’re trying to avoid a chore because you don’t enjoy doing it and would rather someone else deal with it instead. However, great leaders understand their…
VIEW FULL POST

Shake It Off

Our friend Steve Beck has a book titled “Leave Your Funk at the Door” in which he extolls the importance that salespeople and customer-service agents not bring in their personal baggage when they start their workday. (His advice applies to everyone in everyday life, really.) Putting on a happy smile…
VIEW FULL POST