When I spoke to Nafisa Bakkar on the OverTime podcast she reflected on that moment she realised she needed to ‘level-up’ her leadership. In her case, she and her co-founder (her sister) had just raised their first round of funding, and wanted to ensure she used other people’s money in the right way. After facing a lot of key decisions as a new team working within a new company, it was apparent to her that she had to start taking the role of CEO as everyone was looking to her to lead.

For those managers that are struggling to make great hires, don’t be hard on yourself. It’s a skill and like with any skill it takes time and practice in order to find your way. It is unlikely that you have had any training on Hiring or a ton of experience so do the best with what you know. Be sure to reach out to support from your managers, HR team, mentors, experts. You will be surprised how many people get a lot from sharing their best practices on what they are passionate about.

Just because someone has been doing something for a long time this doesn’t mean he or she does it in the way you would like them to. Quality standards, approaches, even ethics, will vary by organization and it is imperative you train your senior hires quickly on your company’s ways of working. This will require patience and persistence, for in some cases you may have to ‘untrain’ and ‘retrain’ some of the fundamentals.

A lot of people I spend my time within the work that I do, are either founders or are part of a founding team. Most of them are under 40, in fact, now that I think of it, they are mostly under 35. They hold senior roles in very exciting and future-facing businesses. They are creative, energized and eager to learn. Their passion shines through everything they do, which helps them build and manage teams of equally eager and high achieving employees. However, they have a key responsibility where they often get a bit stuck, and that’s when it comes to making senior hires.

At the core, it’s people that really make or break a business. Yet often, managers are given the responsibility to hire without any direction, training or education. On the surface, the steps to hiring someone can look relatively straightforward;

I recently interviewed Ross Allmark, Head of Ticketing at music start-up DICE, for our OverTime Podcast series. Ross shared his experience when he received some hard to hear feedback from his team. You can listen to Ross's story here.

As a middle manager, it’s important to ensure what you are feeding upwards is constructive and helpful, and what you’re feeding downwards is clear and purposeful. A lot of managers struggle to differentiate between the two and send everything upwards. We explore how middle managers can best navigate the challenges of sitting between two groups.

I recently designed a workshop for a marketing team who were struggling with time management. It was quite a cathartic exercise for me personally, as time management is definitely something I could improve as well. I framed the workshop around ‘4 Keys’ to effective time management, meaning, the things you need to have in place in order to do it well.