Working for a micromanager can be demoralizing. It’s hard to be confident and motivated when your boss is so obsessed with control that they hover over your every move. But typically, the boss’s micromanaging behavior has less to do with your actual performance and much more to do with their own anxiety.
I recently conducted a study called The Risks Of Ignoring Employee Feedback that involved 27,048 executives, managers and employees. And what I discovered, among other things, is that very few leaders encourage, or are open to hearing, suggestions for improvement from their employees.
Listening with empathy is a critical skill for anyone who wants to succeed at work. Salespeople with great listening skills sell more. Physicians with great listening skills face fewer malpractice lawsuits and have better patient outcomes. Leaders with great listening skills have more inspired and engaged employees.
Develop Communication Skills Using Concrete Language
When we talk about developing great communication skills, you know that when giving a presentation, or a speech, or a “rah rah” rousing the troops, get folks all fired up kind of talk, you have a choice in terms of how you speak.
Imagine if people had zero empathy; if we couldn’t understand others’ perspectives. What kind of world would that be? Terrible, right?
Well, there are troubling signs that, in fact, the world is currently suffering from a major deficit of empathy; that we’re losing (or have lost) the ability and willingness to truly empathize with others. And that’s why this test of empathy is so important!
New managers have a fair number of challenges; maybe they’re a manager for the first time, or taking over a new team that loved their previous manager, or they got promoted over some of the employees they now have to manage.
Whatever the situation, the first thing a new manager has to do, before sitting down and talking to all the people on the team, is to understand ‘what are my goals?’ and ‘what have I been put in this leadership role to accomplish?’
The Drama Queens (and Kings) at your office need to be the center of attention. They’re provocative, emotional and reactive. And they are highly skilled at getting everyone around them worked-up, frazzled and emotional (that’s how they stay at the center of attention).
Did you know that it was Google engineers and not the auto industry that started the race to produce a self-driving car? While the concept of an autonomous car dates back to at least the 1920s, it was Google engineers that matched a well-documented human pain: driver error causes millions of traffic deaths, with the building blocks to a solution: Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View. 
