Feedback properly delivered is a powerful leadership tool. It helps eliminate lousy behaviors and strengthen good behaviors in support of your team's or firm's goals. You will be well served investing the time and energy to master this important discipline. Here are 6 items to think about in support of more effective feedback discussions:
Too many group discussions in the workplace are journeys to nowhere in particular.Learning to actively lead group discussions is an essential skill for leaders and individual contributors in today’s project focused and heavily matrixed organizational settings. Here are 7 common group discussion traps and the techniques that the best guides use to help us side-step them:
Having fulfilled my lifetime quota of attendance at poorly run meetings, I’ve developed a bit of a crusade mentality to guide others on how to run these sessions effectively. Here are my latest top 11 ideas for taming the meeting beast and actually getting something out of these infernal sessions. Please add to the list and we'll all save some time and aggravation!
Beware the dulling effect of a predictable routine on the performance of your team. It might just be the single most dangerous adversary standing between you and future success. Here are 5 ideas to help you breakthrough routine and encourage rethinking:
I don’t hear the phrase “Thank You” in the workplace nearly enough. It's two simple words wrapped in one heartfelt comment of appreciation that offers up a whole heaping helping of genuine respect. All of this from one of the first phrases that Mom ever taught us.
Too many leaders get caught in a people versus performance trap that neither helps the people nor the team’s performance. These leaders give themselves too much credit for being able to change others, and they over-invest in the wrong people at the expense of the rest of the individuals in an organization. This pitfall of what most would describe as a thoughtful, creative and people-focused leader is all too common and left unchecked, can debilitate teams, destroy a performance culture and derail an otherwise promising leadership career.
It’s the feedback that’s never given and the coaching that never occurs that keeps individuals and organizations from improving, learning and growing.
Contrary to what you might believe, the promotion to a role responsible for others is the starting point of your professional education, not the end point reached because of a job well done. For new leaders, that first step into a leadership role can be like stepping off a cliff. Here are 3 key skill sets that you should actively cultivate to help keep you from taking a fall:
I want to know what you know.” One of my early career managers used this line regularly when engaging with her team members. She was genuine in her interest in our take on problems and opportunities, and you could almost hear her mind working as she processed the information and compared and contrasted it with her own views. Her employees genuinely appreciated her effort to see a situation from multiple vantage points. Here are 6 approaches that effective leaders use to guide their teams towards right, without having to dictate direction:
We spend a great deal of our working lives engaging with others in pursuit of ideas and solutions. Unfortunately, most of our workplace discussions tend to resemble a swirl of emotions, ideas and opinions, with little structure to help navigate these very human issues. To help strengthen discussion quality today, and to set the stage for continuous improvement with your discussions, consider applying these 14 suggestions:
