Dealing with intelligent but aggressive staff members, sometimes given the label “alpha” for “leader of the pack” is one of the challenges a manager often faces. On the one hand, they can provide leadership and productivity for your team but on the other hand, they can be hard to manage and disruptive to building collegial staff relationships. In this episode, we’ll discuss ways of dealing with these staff members.

Once you, the hiring manager and your team, have met the final candidates you need to make the best choice for your department. Once you have received feedback from each member of your hiring team, both in a meeting and with their individual ratings, then you’ll be able to make your final decision. Once that is accomplished, and the references verified, it will be time to move on to landing the candidate. This podcast deals with deciding on the top candidate.

The Gallup Organization has been measuring Employee Engagement among thousands of employees since 2000 using questions that measure 12 factors of engagement. The level of enthusiasm employees feel toward their work and workplace is a powerful predictor of numerous important business outcomes, including the quality of the work, level of productivity, safety, and profitability, among other things. In this episode we’ll talk about some of the components of engagement and what managers can to increase it among their staffs.

In our last two episodes, we spoke with Vance Morris, a former senior executive with the Disney Organization, about the benefits to consumer-facing businesses of creating what he calls “Experiences” for their clients. In this episode, we discuss how managers can apply those same techniques to the benefit of their in-house departments even if they don’t have outside customers.

Vance helps business owners get, serve and keep clients for life through creating experiences and response required marketing. He is a Former Birth Control Factory Security Guard turned Disney Leader, turned Bankrupt Out of Work Executive, turned Carpet Cleaner, turned Successful Entrepreneur.

In this episode, Vance talks about the lessons he has learned to become a successful marketer -- in any business.

Vance helps business owners get, serve and keep clients for life through creating experiences and response required marketing. He is a Former Birth Control Factory Security Guard turned Disney Leader, turned Bankrupt Out of Work Executive, turned Carpet Cleaner, turned Successful Entrepreneur.

In this, the first of two episodes, Vance shows how the lessons he learned as a Disney Leader can help any business keep their customers for life.

Every manager, at some time, has to fire or lay off an employee. It is one of the most difficult tasks a manager has, but it must be done caringly and professionally. Layoffs are a special subset of termination. We’ll discuss the process for both in this week’s episode of Management Mastery

It is important that a new manager meet with their staff as a group as soon as possible. In this episode we discuss why and what to cover

The first meeting can occur before or after you’ve begun having one-on-one meetings with your staff. Today we’re going to talk about the parts of your first staff meeting:

· Introductions

· Department and Challenges

· Your Management Style

· Goal Setting.

The more that you can be transparent about the challenges, management style and goals the faster and more effectively the team will function. It will save time since staff will not have to meet at the water cooler to try to figure out how to deal with you.