There are a number of ways you can stand out as a performer in your company or department. All of them require you to have mastered all aspects of your current role first, and then to have your head up so that you’re listening, observing, and understanding the goals of your department and company. In this way you’ll be able to be productive for your department and yourself. We’ll talk about that in this week's Management Mastery episode.

Major changes can be upsetting in any organization, no matter what kind of change it is. The manager’s responsibility in such cases is to communicate clearly and effectively about the change as much as possible in order to keep rumors and unnecessary anxieties at a minimum. We’ll discuss several of the pitfalls in this kind of situation and how managers can avoid falling into them in this episode of Management Mastery.

Power dynamics are essentially the ways in which influence and control are manifested among individuals or groups and how they impact or controls relationships and interactions. Power Dynamics include both formal authority as well as informal influence, They exist in both the workplace as well as in social settings. We will examine power dynamics over the next few episodes as they are a critical factor in being successful as both a manager and a member of a team. We will start by talking about how to identify them and understand how they operate in a group.

Do you know your boss’s goals and specific objectives? If you answered “Yes” to that question you’re ahead of a number of your colleagues. If you answered “No” then you have an opportunity to make up ground. We’ll discuss some ways to do that in this episode.

The minute you get promoted, you will no longer be the same person to your boss, your colleagues or your new staff. In this encore episode of Management Mastery, we cover these changes and how to deal with them.

When overseeing a project in their department, the manager must continuously evaluate progress and make the decision when to wind down the project. We covered, in a previous episode of Management Mastery, the manager’s role in monitoring the progress of a project. In this episode, we cover the steps important to the successful winding down and conclusion of any project.

We’ve discussed defining the problem a project is meant to address, selecting the team for the project and conducting the initial team meeting. Ideally, once the project is underway, the manager’s role becomes one of monitoring the team’s progress to ensuring its success. The project needs to be managed through a clear, efficient, operational structure if it’s to be successful.. That’s the topic for this week’s episode.

After understanding the project and choosing the best staff to achieve success, we now move to the important initial meeting with staff. This meeting, if handled well, will dramatically increase your odds of having a successful project.