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One: relevant and honest positive feedback boosts motivation. Two: if you neglect giving feedback shortly after you see something you disapprove of, feelings of growing frustration will develop in your heart as you see the same behaviour again and again, and it will probably burst out with the least...
One is to mentally exit the meeting, start playing with your phone or answer e-mails. The other option is taking the lead and turning the meeting into a worthwhile conversation that focuses on finding a solution to the problem. You can do that by asking some questions that direct the attention of th...
As the well-known theorist, Abraham Maslow asserted, these needs have a hierarchical order with the prerequisite of lower level needs to be fulfilled first, before we can start focusing on the top ones in the pyramid. Alderfer further distilled these thoughts to state that humans have three categori...
Otherwise, decent pay is the baseline. If you wish to stand out from the crowd and build on an array of motivators that is available, it makes a lot of sense to abandon the mindset that people only work for their pay check.
Let’s start with the results a very recent global survey from 2018, carried o...
In a 2018 BCG global study, among the Top 5 work preferences were “good relationship with superior”, “learning opportunities”, and “career development”, all of which are closely associated with their direct boss acting as coach or mentor.
When managers are practicing a coaching approac...
Let’s review three actions you can take to ensure that your actual use of time reflects your true priorities.
1. Enlist your most important goals in your key roles for the next 6 months
We have several roles both at work and in our private life. We are specialists, functional managers, people managers...
“A few years ago I put it like this for myself – it will probably sound harsh – the opinion of people does not raise my interest. The reason is that the meaning of the word ‘opinion’ is not very rich. Maybe there is no knowledge, depth or truth in it. (…) nowadays everyone has an opinion. Lots of pe...
Most recently, this myth has developed even further: instead of training events, brief infotainment sessions are offered to busy managers, providing opportunities for “inspiration”. Managers at international or large local companies went through traditional leadership trainings a long time ago (not ...
For me, it says that however good these initiatives are intended they have minor impact on improving engagement. When we consider the reports of Towers Watson’s Global Workforce Survey or Gallup’s Global Workplace Survey about employee engagement, they conclude that only 11-27% of the employees...
Despite the fact that our research work has not been representative, there are several interesting findings for those involved in developing leaders.
Even though the use of leadership development initiatives and feedback systems have stagnated or even slightly decreased over the past five years, mana...
This group consists of 7 friends, businessmen aged between 35 and 45. For several years, they have met for breakfast on Thursdays at 7.45. Believe it or not, every single Thursday.
The team is very diverse: managers from small firms and large companies, local and multinational, employees and entrepre...
Let me lead you through this…
In the beginning, each skill we try to obtain is in box A, it means we can’t do it yet.
Do we progress by choosing a few things we can’t do well, then we learn how to do it, we practice a lot and we’ll be able to do it extraordinarily? Is this really how we develop e...
To move one step further, we asked what kind of digital tools they use for this purpose. 50% mentioned e-learning courses, 32% referred to social learning platforms and 18% indicated mobile-learning. So even in a region that is technologically advanced, the majority of companies are still only talki...
The lack of control over her own calendar is very frustrating. It gets even more annoying when she discovers during a leadership development program that she neglects most of her people management responsibilities, which she otherwise considers rather important.
But how could she find time for that a...
They tried to figure out how the managers of outstanding, average and low performing teams differ from each other. While there were several differences, I would only like to underscore one of them in this post.
Managers of high performing units systematically apply a performance management routine, w...
Unlike training courses, where the moment of learning and the moment of application can be very distant from each other, this digital device would help with the specific information or idea that is needed at that very moment. All of it seemed like Utopia, especially for us, who had been hands-on non...
These efforts – even if they are well-intentioned – have poor results in leadership performance improvement. Leaders can only turn 15-20% of their knowledge into actionat best.
Most leadership development programs revolve around a false assumption: if leaders understand, they actually do it.
If w...
Over two thirds of employees are far from being engaged in their jobs. And most of their disappointment is closely related to the way they are managed. Why do leadership development initiatives appear to be so ineffective?
Soft skills can not be developed solely by knowledge transfer. It is totally i...
It is fairly easy to hold a lecture or a training session. It is much more difficult to design and deliver a learning experience that engages a group of managers. The greatest challenge, however, is to build a development process that truly results in change of behaviour.
Ten years ago, we decided no...
