Five Dos and Donts of Your First Management Position

Five Dos and Donts of Your First Management PositionFive Dos and Donts of Your First Management PositionYouve mastered the art of meeting your deadlines, hitting your goals and accomplishing your deadlines. As a reward youve been promoted to a manager role. Or perhaps you eventually see yourself with that title change and increase in responsibility. Making the move from independent contributor to manager can be a challenging task. Stick to a few simple dos and donts to be the best manager you can be.DO1. Say Yes, and.The first rule of thumb for any aspiring or new manager is to never turn down a challenge. In fact, try to remove no from your vocabulary as much as possible. If you find yourself being asked to do something with unreasonable expectations, instead of saying no, try a new approach. Try to respond with a reset with reasonable expectations Yes, Id love to take on that project. And with my current priorities, I think I can deliver that in a week. Yes, and can help make you a positive kollektiv player.2. Change your focus from mine to oursAs an independent contributor, your time was spent entirely focused on your own priorities, goals and deadlines. However, as a manager (or an aspiring manager) its important to look at your goals as part of the teams goals. When youre too focused on your own work and bedrngnis on the teams work, it can make you difficult to approach.3. Find ways to informally mentor othersIf you havent been named a manager, look around you. Chances are there are plenty of people whom you could give a helping hand or share your expertise. Perhaps your organization has some interns. Try taking one of them under your wing, and help guide them in their work. Youll gain attention and notice by demonstrating your leadership skills above and beyond your job description.4. Present a problem and a possible solutionWhen youre good at your job, its easy to spot problems as they arise. You can see that speed bump two miles down the road. However, as a manager its important to always provide a solution to your problem. It is now your job to be a positive and proactive influence for your team and your organization as a whole. By being a solution-generating employee you increase your value to the organization.5. Become a shock absorber, not an amplifierMy dad always taught me that there are two types of people at work the shock absorbers and the amplifiers. Amplifiers do just that amplify. Office politics, gossip, dissent, stress and fear can quickly spread through an organization if too many of these types of people roam your company break room. Contrastingly, a shock absorber creates a safe and calm place for all employees to address conflict without adding fuel to the fire. As a manager it is now your job to help keep your team calm so that they can weather any storm. Dont let your reputation be one of a rabble rouser.DONT1. Assign blameWeve all experienced the person who throws us under the bus, and its awful. As a manager accountability is key. If your team fails, you have failed. Dont waste time trying to point fingers or deflect blame. Instead, try to take responsibility and work with your team members to address the situation and create a plan for how you would alter behavior moving forward.2. Be complacentIf find yourself or one of your team members suddenly without a project, dont let yourselves get too comfortable. Be proactive and find something new. Perhaps someone in another department could use some extra hands, or maybe theres a long-term priority that has been left to sit. Whatever you do, do your best to always add value.3. Get caught up in office politicsThat water cooler can be a dangerous place. When you spend upwards of 40 hours a week with the same people, its very easy to find yourself caught up in the day-to-day dramas and gossip of a modern-day workplace. However, as manager or aspiring manager, its imperative that you stay above the fray. Once you participate in the gossip-mong ering, its very difficult to regain any respect that was lost. If you overhear such negativity, try to walk away or turn the conversation to a more positive topic. Youll be happy when people think of you as someone who elevates the company culture rather than one who detracts from it.4. Forget the big pictureYour teams priorities are important. Deadlines should be met. Task lists should be completed. However, try not to lose your vision of the big picture. Why does your team have these tasks assigned to them? What is their impact? What is the value to the business? If you answer these questions every day, youll not only ensure that you always understand your larger organizations priorities, but youll also ensure that your team sees and understands its daily impact against those priorities.5. Avoid conflictIt can be difficult to address conflict, but what is the impact on yourself and your team if you dont? Never allow yourself to be a pushover or your team to be taken advantage of. Rather than backing away from conflict, simply ensure that you address it respectfully and politely. Tone is everything.

Customize this Impressive Customer Service Manager Resume Sample

Customize this Impressive Customer tafelgeschirr Manager Resume SampleCustomize this Impressive Customer Service Manager Resume SampleCreate Resume Adam Pentley100 Broadway LaneNew Parkland, CA, 91010Cell (555) 987-1234example-emailexample.comProfessional SummaryDedicated Customer Service Manager capable of monitoring special client projects while empowering customer service associates to solve problems. Developed experience in training effective customer service associates, working closely with sales to retain clients and creating effective metrics for measuring productivity. Believes that every customer service associate needs to be interested in creating a positive customer experience.Core QualificationsCreating Productivity MetricsEmployee TrainingAssociate RecruitingDepartmental BudgetingBusiness PlanningClient RetentionExperienceCustomer Service Manager, September 2010 May 2015NJU Incorporated New Cityland, CACreated a set of new productivity metrics that lead to a higher ov erall customer satisfaction rating.Able to develop special teams to help handle larger client projects.Rewrote many of the customer service policies to give associates a greater range of solutions for clients.Customer Service Manager, June 1998 December 2004Steib Company New Cityland, CAResponsible for a 23 percent rise in customer retention.Implemented policies that lowered employee turnover.Worked with human resurces to improve customer service recruiting tactics.Education1998 Bachelor of Science, BusinessBeachlight College New Cityland, CACustomize ResumeCustomer Service Manager Resume Questions1. What goes in the header of a customer service manager resume?The header of your resume should be subtle and short. You almost want the readers not to notice it until they are ready to contact you. You can see an example of this on our customer service manager resume sample.You need to include your full name, email address, and phone number. You can also choose whether you want to inc lude your mailing address. Many jobseekers will give their home city but omit their address to make it more streamlined.2. How do you write a summary statement for a customer service manager resume?The summary statement should be the first section and very brief. We recommend formatting it as either three sentences or three bullet points. This section needs to showcase your abilities and incorporate aspects from throughout the rest of the resume. It was once standard for the summary to include objective information, although this is no longer the case. Only describe your goals if you have never worked in the customer service field before and are transferring from another field. Take a look at our customer service manager resume sample to see the example summary.3. Whats the best way to show you work well in a team on a customer service manager resume?As with any attribute, the best way to demonstrate that you work well on a team is to incorporate it in every section in your resume. You should mention it in your summary and as a bullet point in the skills section. Include examples of good teamwork in your experience section. Our customer service manager resume sample and the step-by-step resume builder will help you with seamlessly including this information.4. What should your education section look like in a customer service manager resume?The education section should appear at the end of your resume and be the shortest section. As you see in the customer service manager resume sample, there are only three pieces of information that you must list the type of degree you earned, the date you earned it, and the school you graduated from. Some may suggest including your GPA, but this is generally not recommended unless the hiring manager requests it specifically.5. Whats the best format for a resume PDF, MS Word, or txt?In actuality, any of these formats are acceptable for your resume. In most cases, you can choose whichever one you prefer. There is no standard f ile format that all resumes must be in. If it is important to particular hiring managers, they will include this information in the job description. This means you should pay attention to file format requirements. You should instead focus on making the content of your resume as strong as possible. The customer service manager resume sample will help you with this aspect.

So Much Bad Resume Advice, So Little Time

So Much Bad Resume Advice, So Little Time So Much Bad Resume Advice, So Little Time Every now and then, one of my clients sends their resume in to another service for a critique. When they send it to some places, they get an honest response usually saying this is great and you dont need any mora help. But when they send it to one of the big resume mills (you know, Career Builder, The Ladders, Monster etc), they invariably get back a long critique telling them the resume needs a complete rewrite and offering to do it for only $695 or whatever their fee is.My clients and I usually discuss this feedback, address the one or two nuggets that are relevant and brush off the rest. But today I got one back that really annoyed me. Not because it was critical of me (I sometimes have to face the fact that Im not actually perfect) but because it was just plain wrong. Success is not always Quantifiable My client worked for a web development agency and had gained some very valuable knowledge about a number of web analytics programs. He became so competent that everyone in the company came to him for help when analyzing one of their web sites. But because of the nature of his work and the way his company ran, he couldnt quantify exactly how this knowledge had helped anyone he just didnt have access to the numbers.But given his target positions, this skill was likely to make him very valuable so I included it in a list called areas of expertise. But I wanted to go further. I wanted to show that he didnt just know about analytics he knew enough to be the one part everyone relied on. So I added a bullet point to his resume saying exactly that. Im paraphrasing now because I dont want to publish his exact resume text here, but my bullet read along the lines ofBecame the go-to guy among 25+ employees for all things related to web analytics, providing guidance on set-up, analysis and reporting to developers and designers on over 30 sites to date.Now its a basic tenet of resume wri ting that your bullet points should always contain quantifiable accomplishments (you should say you increased sales by 13% or you boosted customer satisfaction by 25%), so when the resume mill got hold of my clients resume, they told him this bullet point had to go that he was under-selling himself by not quantifying his accomplishment.Nonsense.If we had numbers, then including them would have been better. We could have said that by using his knowledge of Google Analytics, he revamped some landing pages for a client and thereby increased their conversion by 60%. That would have been great But he didnt do that or at least, if he did, we dont know about it.So we worked with what we had the fact that his co-workers seek him out for help indicates a level of expertise that will be valuable to come potential employers, and we shouldnt have left that off the resume just because we couldnt quantify the impact. How does this impact you? Which brings me to your resume and the reason for w riting this post. Youve read lots of stuff (some of it even written by me) that tells you to quantify, quantify, quantify. Results are everything we say. Make sure employers know how you have made an impact. But what we sometimes forget to say is that not all successes are quantifiable and that in those cases, you need to look for other ways to prove your worth. And one of those ways is to demonstrate that other people value your knowledge.I think the key is to remember that when you write your resume, youre telling a story. And that in storytelling, there are lots of ways to make your point. If the most obvious one isnt available to you, that doesnt mean you have to give up it just means you have to be a little more creative in getting your point across.