If you already know your career goals consider yourself lucky. Many of us don’t really know our career goals and passions and it becomes a matter of investigating and questioning before we identify a direction. The purpose of this episode is to help you think through that process.

Every manager, at some time, has to fire 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 Encore episode.

There are a number of honest mistakes new managers often make. In this Encore episode, we discuss three of the most common and often some of the hardest to totally avoid making.

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.