Crucial Leadership Practice: People mistakenly assume that delegation is all or nothing: “I do it” or “you do it.” This view is over simplistic—and sometimes negligent. “To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” (Abraham Maslow). Don’t be a hammer. Expand your range and flexibility as a leader. In my last blog, I described [Read More]

Feedback can be invaluable for improving your performance, calibrating your efforts, and identifying opportunities for improvement. Good feedback is tough to get: Asking for feedback is a risky business. You never know what you are going to get. And it is usually difficult to get anything at all. When you ask people point-blank for feedback, [Read More]

Workshops can be great opportunities to step back from the trees to look at the forest: What kind of leader am I? What kind of leader do I want to be? How can I take my leadership practices up to the next level? I encourage my workshop participants to engage in the workshop – to [Read More]

A key success factor in training & development (T&D) is support from senior leaders: you need funding, you need their buy-in and support, you need their time and help. The problem is that many business leaders don’t understand the value of training. And everyone has been to crappy workshops. Here is a little introduction to [Read More]

What good is a workshop if the participants don’t use anything they have learned after the workshop is over? Here are a few practical tactics that I share with workshop participants at the end of my workshops. I am writing this blog more or less how I pitch it (verbally) to participants in my workshops. [Read More]

Leadership at the bottom: We mistakenly assume that leadership is reserved for the people at the top — especially crème de la crème leadership activities like creating vision, strategy and core values. This is a perilous mistake that cuts off executives from employees, chokes the idea pipeline, and obstructs professional development at all levels. Don’t [Read More]

How do you deal with under-valued skills, or an unfair or unjustified reputation? Outline: Perception is never completely objective Feedback is important Bad feedback is sometimes correct How to deal with an unjustified reputation No immaculate perception: How others perceive you is not the final truth of who you are. Perception does not equal reality. [Read More]

Why 360: One of the most powerful benefits of 360° feedback is that leaders get a chance to compare their own self-perception directly against the perception of others. This is of utmost importance. No one is an island unto themselves. Your work impacts others and the work of others impacts you. The strength of your [Read More]

Workshop Follow Up for the Managers of Participants   The best workshop in the world will have little or no impact if participants do not use what they have learned. Workshop follow up unlocks the potential value of your workshops, turns good intentions into action, good ideas into results, and good workshops into game changers. Engage [Read More]

Workshop Follow Up: Accountability and Support Since the goal of training is to help people improve their practices at work, and since people learn primarily from doing, workshop follow up is a crucial part of the learning.There are many important ways to follow up from a workshop. Everyone has a stake in improved performance so [Read More]

THE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT CYCLE Performance management (PM) is useless when it is merely an annual check-up. No one loves their evaluation forms and most people find evaluations unpleasant and destructive. So what gives? Done right, performance management is one of the most powerful tools for driving continuous performance and skill improvement. Solid PM should clarify goals, [Read More]

Team coaching Coaching a team is not all that different from coaching individuals. It is a little more complex due to team dynamics and the mixing of different personality styles. Nevertheless, most of the principles and methods are the same. Here are a few handy guidelines. Team performance management & coaching: Team performance management is [Read More]

USING PROJECT MANAGEMENT IN COACHING Good old fashioned project management can be used by managers in most coaching situations. As a specialist in coaching and leadership development, I have developed sophisticated / complex coaching cycles and both teach and practice highly specialized kinds of coaching, e.g., narrative coaching and coaching leaders through leadership transitions. I [Read More]

To perform well and be successful over the long term, companies must manage talent strategically, i.e., align talent management with organizational vision and strategy. But this is not enough. Companies must also tailor talent management to the unique needs of their best employees and leaders, i.e., their learning needs, career aspirations, and potential.   The [Read More]

If you do not stop from time to time to ask: “Did it work?”, “Were we right?”, “Was that the best way to do it?” then you are operating on hunches, intuition, luck, tradition and habit rather than facts, evidence and analysis—and you are probably not gaining much real work experience or learning on the [Read More]

To be competitive today, managers must coach far more than employee performance (productivity). Managers must coach employees on a broad and balanced set of drivers of individual and organizational performance, including strategic focus and alignment, employee engagement, adherence to core values, and continuous skill development.

I bet you have never heard someone shout excitedly: “I love our new performance evaluation forms!” or “Performance appraisal time is our favourite time of the year!” For most people, performance evaluations are stressful, useless, and sometimes even destructive.

This blog will share an approach to performance management that is constructive, helpful, and collaborative rather than destructive, judgmental, punitive.