Most managers coach employees by giving them feedback and evaluating their performance, right? Wrong. Coaching differs markedly from other managerial functions. With its wealth of tips, worksheets, and self-assessments, this handy guide shows managers how to use coaching--not only to strengthen direct reports' skills but also to rev up their performance to unprecedented levels.

The command-and-control leadership techniques of the past are increasingly ineffective. Instead, today's business leaders need to be alert, agile, enterprising, and skilled in the art of diplomacy. Leading People will show readers it's not enough to have courage and charisma. For the twenty-first century, leaders also need communication, conflict-resolution, and motivational skills. After all, leaders not only cope with change - they create it Readers will learn to: Set a Direction; Inspire Followers; Craft Your Vision; and Drive Change.

In challenging times, companies must serve their customers faster and more efficiently. This makes improving your business processes more critical than ever. In this book, you'll learn key steps for carrying out a business process improvement initiative, including how to:
-Plan a business process improvement initiative
-Analyze and redesign a current process that needs improvement
-Obtain the resources needed to change a process
-Develop a systematic approach for creating and implementing change

Leading productive teams requires laying the groundwork for success and following through effectively. This guide offers immediately actionable advice on how to choose the right team members; clarify goals, rules, and responsibilities; foster trust, creativity, and risk taking; and resolve conflicts and maximize productivity.
The Pocket Mentor Series offers immediate solutions to common challenges managers face on the job every day. Each book in the series is packed with handy tools, self-tests, and real life examples to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and hone critical skills. Whether you're at your desk, in a meeting, or on the road, these portable guides enable you to tackle the daily demands of your work with greater speed, savvy, and effectiveness.

Setting goals is a key part of any manager's job. Through goal setting, you define business outcomes that you and your team will accomplish collectively and individually. Managed effectively, the goal-setting process creates a long-term vision that motivates you and your employees to reach even the most challenging objectives. Every day on the job, you face common challenges. And you need immediate solutions to those challenges. The Pocket Mentor Series can help. Each book in the series is packed with handy tools, self-tests, and real-life examples to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and hone critical skills. Whether you're at your desk, in a meeting, or on the road, these portable, concise guides enable you to tackle the daily demands of your work with speed, savvy, and effectiveness.

In an age of stiffening competition, everyone in an organisation must develop a strategic mind-set - by understanding the company's competitive strategy and helping the firm execute it. In this essential resource, readers will find guidelines for creating the HR initiatives, policies, and departmental structures that will ensure success. You're developing crucial strategies for numerous HR efforts--workforce planning and talent retention, compensation, training and development, and recruitment and selection. How do you ensure that these HR strategies deliver as promised - and help hone your company's competitive edge?

The New Manager's Guide and Mentor. The Harvard Business Essentials series provides comprehensive advice, personal coaching, background information, and guidance on the most relevant topics in business. Drawing on rich content from Harvard Business School Publishing and other sources, these concise guides are carefully crafted to provide a highly practical resource for readers with all levels of experience and will prove especially valuable for the new manager. To assure quality and accuracy, a specialized content adviser from a world-class business school closely reviews each volume. Whether you are a new manager seeking to expand your skills or a seasoned professional looking to broaden your knowledge base, these solution-oriented books put reliable answers at your fingertips.

The Innovator's Toolkit What are the types of innovation? How can you generate creative ideas for your business? How can you move from ideas to unleashing you innovation to the market? How can you combine your innovation with a strategic plan to move your company forward? Get these questions answered with jargon-free, useable, practical tools and advice. The Innovator?s Toolkit offers you field-tested techniques and tips to ensure the successful development and implementation of your innovation. Topics Include: - Moving innovation to the market - Making strategic, innovative moves and placing strategic bets - Using projects to drive innovation to market Readers can also access free interactive tools on the Harvard Business Essentials companion Web site at www.elearning.hbsp.org/businesstools. Harvard Business Essentials The Reliable Source for Busy Managers The Harvard Business Essentials series is designed to provide comprehensive advice, personal coaching, background information, and guidance on the most relevant topics in business. Drawing on rich content from Harvard Business School Publishing and other sources, these concise guides are carefully crafted to provide a highly practical resource for readers with all levels of experience. To assure quality and accuracy, each volume is closely reviewed by a specialized content adviser from a world class business school. Whether you are a new manager interested in expanding your skills or an experienced executive looking for a personal resource, these solution-oriented books offer reliable answers at your fingertips.

Good feedback is essential to helping employees perform better at work. It lets people know when they are meeting or exceeding expectations, and when they need to get back on the right track. This practical guide shows managers how to develop and refine this necessary skill. The books in this series offer immediate solutions to the challenges managers face every day. Each book is packed with handy tools, checklists, and real life examples, including a Test Yourself section to help identify strengths and weaknesses. For all readers eager to address the daily demands of work, these books are ideal.

You've just been promoted to a managerial position for the first time -- congratulations! But beware: the managerial role differs markedly from the individual contributor role. Go into the job with mistaken assumptions about what to expect, and you just may be blindsided by surprising realities. This book helps you lay the foundation for succeeding in your new role, explaining how to: * Discard the "doer" role of the individual contributor for the orchestrating role of the manager * Adjust your leadership style to maximize your team's performance * Balance conflicting expectations from your boss, peers, and direct reports * Deal productively with the stresses and new emotions that come with being a manager

"Managing Time" delivers proven advice on how to get the right things done - faster, smarter, and more efficiently. From setting goals and breaking them down into tasks to creating a manageable schedule and putting it into action, this user-friendly guide outlines proactive ways to focus on mission-critical tasks, eliminate or delegate non-priority projects, control interruptions, and avoid distractions. It is the essential guide to maximizing every manager's most valuable commodity. It instructs readers how to: set goals and focus on high-priority tasks; organise their space and save their time; use scheduling tools that really work for them; avoid distractions and control interruptions; delegate effectively; and, get more done in less time.