Managers Need To Learn How To Tell The Hard Truth At Work

Managers have to make sure that people know that they want bad news

Just exactly how comfortable are you telling your boss or the people that you work with exactly what you think about them or their ideas? Honesty is very important to helping teams operate correctly, but it sure is hard to find the manager skills needed to do it right. Teams need candor from their employees, … Read more

Questions An IT Managers Should NOT Ask During A Performance Review

Until someone comes up with a better way to evaluate the performance of the members of our team, we are going to be faced with conducting annual performance reviews. The sad thing here is that we don’t look forward to doing them and the members of our team don’t look forward to participating in them. … Read more

Do Politics Have Any Place In The Office?

Oh my! Politics has always been a contentious issue, but it sure seems as though in the past few years it has become even more so. In England the Brexit vote and in the U.S. the 2016 presidential election created hard lines between people who normally work side by side. How should an IT manager … Read more

How Should An IT Manager Handle Team Conflicts?

I’m currently in charge of a team of skilled IT development professionals. They each have their own set of skills that they bring to my team and I need each of them to be operating at peak efficiency if I want to have any hope of my team being a success. However, I’m currently facing … Read more

16 Management Skills Every IT Manager Needs To Have

I can’t tell you how often I get asked the question “what does it take to be a good IT manager?” As with all such simple questions, there is no one simple answer. The truth is that to be a really good IT manager you need to have a very special mix of both technical … Read more

Hello IT Manager: You’re In Politics Now!

Can’t an IT manager just rise above all of the politics? I mean really, with all of the technology leadership decisions that need to be made along with the business processes that need to be streamlined, can’t we all just skip the politics and get down to business? It turns out that we can’t and … Read more

IT Managers Need To Understand Why Staff Stay – And Why They Leave

As an IT manager, your job is to lead a team and accomplish tasks. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? You can only do this if the team that you are managing stays together. If people start to leave, it’s disruptive when they leave and you are going to be distracted as you work to fill … Read more

Making Changes To Your IT Department – 8 Things An IT Leader Should Know

Have you ever heard the phrase “When senior management doesn’t know what to do, they reorganize”? I’m not sure if this is always true, but it sure seems as though when times are tough reorganizations, restructuring, and even re-engineering are things that can happen to any department in IT. What’s an IT Leader to do … Read more

Your Next IT Manager Challenge: Girl Fight!

By this time in the 21st Century, I’m hoping that we’ve all got the diversity message: gender, race, age, sexual orientation (you too California) don’t matter when hiring people for jobs or when managing them. However, it turns out that there’s been a pink elephant lurking in the room that many of us (males) may … Read more