Well i must admit that I had my fair share of bad bosses. What was my bad boss doing ? Well basically he lied, exaggerated, never gave me credit (or always thought of finding bad things in good outcomes) etc.

I was lucky that I was working in a matrix management system (in that, my day-to-day tasks were handled by this “bad boss”, but I also had a “good boss” that did not have a say in the overall situation – he handled mostly holidays etc).

Since some of you, reading this, are not lucky enough to have the good boss to help you out, here is what I have learned from this good boss (I will pass the b*llshit found on Google in that “you need to make sure he is bad…” – for me he was clearly a bad boss)

1. Always have a paper trail

This is basically always making sure that any conversation you have with a bad boss (that also lies) is to have everything on email! There are no ways of him to say “i did not say that”, “you did not understand what i was saying” etc.

After a meeting where you agreed on something or he has told you something, always send an email where you say “As we discussed, we agreed on the following: …“. Of course this situation will make him more cautious when he is telling you stuff, because he now knows you are “prepared” and it will appear on email.

2. Do an excellent job

Even if you know that he will try to find mistakes in what you did, his bosses (if you do a great job) will see what you do (or make them notice if they do not know) so that he cannot just throw lies around.

This is one of the big challenges of any manager. How do you ignite the “fire” within your employees.

What can a manager do to engage his team?

Here are a couple of ways to start motivating your team and engage them:

1. Believe in them – you need to be sure and never stop believing that people can make extraordinary things happen. You need to establish trust with them by applying candor, transparency, and always giving them credit for good performance

2. Create personal and professional connection with them – create connection and keep people informed and in conversation. Good leaders get into everyone’s skin, exuding positive energy and optimism.

3. Engage them – let employees be active in helping make things better. As them for ideas on how to improve the process and follow on them, if they create a great benefit for the company. More often then not employees can improve on the process and make it more efficient.

Do you inspire your employees?

This is an important part of any manager’s role. It’s not just a nice thing – it’s a requirement (although many managers are not held to a high enough standard). Inspiring team members is a requirement because managers are responsible for optimising performance and retention – and uninspired employees don’t do their best work and often do not stay for too long.

So with that, here are a few ideas for how to inspire others. Feel free to add your ideas in the comments.

1. Be a role model (of courage). When our managers demonstrate courage, this will inspire us to do the same and we will respect them all the more.
2. Take a stand. Share your perspective and be open. The most inspiring leaders have a strong vision for how things ought to be.
3. Listen more, speak less. Show your employees that you value input and collaboration. This applies to your team members and peers. Be truly interested in them and try to see the issue from their side.
4. Beat your goals and don’t rest until you do. People want to work for successful leaders.
5. Make them feel important. In fact, swap places with them every now and then. Show them you want to understand what their world looks and feel like and that their work is truly important (and believe that is true)
6. Represent your employee’s needs to senior management and with your peers. Take the initiative to make things better. Wow, that will speak volumes about your intention to serve them and this is very inspiring.
7. Adopt a win-win attitude. Show them what they can learn even in boring tasks or some they do not like. Nothing inspires more people to do their best if they are seeing that they could gain something from it.

The above 7 ways of inspiring and motivating others is a must for any manager. That said, I have met several managers who flatly reject that they need to inspire others. If that’s you, I recommend another career path because you obviously don’t understand the power and importance of your management position.

What are your ways of inspiring others?

What is planning  and why plan?

Well planning is basically a concrete view of an idea. A plan is a mental view that shows who, how, when and where somebody a has to do an action and in which purpose.

We cannot plan everything in life or in our careers, but “no plan” is still a plan. We need to make a plan because it can show us what will happen, or what should happen in our quest to reach a goal or implement an idea.

A concrete plan can help us follow the milestones that are needed to reach an objective and can show everybody that is aware of the it, what they have to do, when and with which resources.

Does planning really work in practice ?

Well most of the time it does not work well in practice, because people do not invest enough effort and time. A good planning, needs a lot of effort and also it has to solve a problem, reach an objective or implement a good idea. If nobody believes in an idea, then why should they believe in your plan? If you cannot sell your idea to you, then why would somebody believe in it, thus why they should be interested in following your plan ?

A planner who does not know that about freewheeling and brainstorming and about the fact that the 70th idea is probably the best one, will create a plan where this is missing.

In some cases, even if the planning is properly done, but the people did not buy into your idea, then it is useless.

How to correctly make a plan?

Any plan, it does not matter if it is for a day, week, year, 10-years is made out of 2 main things

1. The Goal that must be attained
2. The way in which we attain that goal (WHO, WHEN, WHAT and HOW)

Setting a goal that must be attained

You need to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is important in my life ?
2. How do I want to use my time ?
3. What are my limits ?
4. What I really want to be ?

In other words what is my ideal goal on the long term ?

The first 2 questions shows that it is not easy to setup a long term goal. Maybe i want to be a successful business owner, but i also want to spend 80% of my time practicing mindfulness.

We always have to try to learn from the past. Ask yourself the following questions

• What can I learn from my past ?
• What results did i have from my previous goal planning? What was good, what was bad, how can i improve it ?
•  What are my strong points ? What possibilities do I have today to reach my goals ? What obstacles will I have ?

The way in which we attain that goal (WHO, WHEN, WHAT and HOW)

This is basically setting up your priorities. On you can know the answer to these questions. I will try to help with an example. For eg. if your professional goal is to launch a new product on the market, then you can:

1. WHO will launch this product on the market ? Will I be in charge ?
2. WHEN do I plan to launch it ?
3. WHAT do I need to do, to make sure that it is launched ?
4. HOW can I start working on this ?

So what are you waiting for ? Go and setup a clear plan on reaching your goal!

One of the most undervalued things that a human can do is setting goals, both for professional and personal life. I will present you in this article why you need one and how to set it.

Hundreds of athletes from the entire world are now preparing for the next Olympic games. None of them, women or men, are going to drop the training under the pretext: “It will be ok when the time comes. There are still a few months/years till the Olympics, so I will take it slow”.

What makes these athletes pass through all these difficult training, day after day, year after year ? The answer is simple: They have a goal! They have a well defined objective that deserves any effort that is made!

As Viktor Frankl beautifully put it, any suffering stops being suffering the moment it finds a purpose!

To generate ideas, is one of the most useful skill.

We owe the evolution of our cultural and technical to ideas and intuition. Any progress is based on our imagination and creativity.

What can stop us from having idea?

Some people think that they are too old to do this creative effort. But a lot of well know people reached their peak of creative abilities at a later stage. Mark Twain had over 70 years when he created 3 more books, Goethe, Kant, Voltaire and a lot of great poets/philosophers had over 60 years whey they created new things.

Laziness, prejudgment, timidty, low energy and determination are obstacles that blocks our creativity that should help us to create a better future.

Some of it start when we were young. We can just say that at the age of 3 we were all entrepreneurs. We asked over 400 questions per day, we tested a lot of things and we did a lot of things.

What was the reaction of our parents ? They said: “You are not allowed to do this and that”. A 3 year old kid, is born to conquer the world, to grow in all direction, but he is forced to enter a convetional pattern. The moment the kid reaches the age of school, his thoughts do not have a freedom of his own, but followed an accepted path.

…and it continues as school…
The teaches do NOT accept a wrong answer. They react in a way that our mind becomes a street with only one way.

What is the world of a manager?

Every person sees “his world” in a different way. For developers, the world is a PC, for a construction worker, the world is brick and mortar. There they get specific possibilities and opportunities to solve problems.

The hunting woods is the world of the hunter, the mountains belong to the climbers, the intellectual lives in a world of perception, of ideas and logical associations. In part, we all build our own world, but we are also created by.

But what is the world of a manager ?

This was is made out of markets, requests and offers. The markets can be:

1. Client
2. Capital
3. Management
4. Workforce
5. Know-how
6. Resources (water, energy etc)
7. Partners
8. State

The above, of course, is not something new but with new times new challenges appear and that is great news for managers and the way that we want to change the world

What is coaching ?

Coaching is an activity oriented towards developing the abilities of people to reach the desired objectives. It is a personal interaction, a dialog between 2 people, where the coach only assists and helps the person being coached.

Coaching is not oriented towards the past, but towards the future and finding solutions for difficult issues but without giving any specific instructions. As Timothy Gallwey says

A coaching session not only helps the one that is being coached, but also the coach himself. So we highly recommend trying it out.

We always hear about adopting a win-win attitude, but how can we achieve this ?

Here you will find 5 steps on how to think on your next negotiation and try to achieve a win-win outcome:

Step1 – Thinking assertive

This way of thinking basically says “I do not have to lose for somebody else to win” or “If i win, somebody has to lose”. There is always a possibility of a good result that it is beneficial to both parties.

Step2 – Mentioning your own needs and wishes