Giving feedback

Few activities in a workplace polarize like performance reviews. Some see them as subjective and ungrounded, one-sided and boss-dominated and something we should do away with entirely, an opinion put forth most recently in a Wall Street Journal article. Others find them an invaluable tool to develop employees and move the company forward. Our view? […]

Just because leadership feedback is positive doesn't mean it's helpful.

Do it before completing 50-60% of your work.

Four things to do before you lose your temper.

Instead of pay formulas, Samuelson depends on extensive discussion and what seems fair.

Four tips a champion diver learned from her coach.

by Beverly Ballaro

Three ways managers make the process harder than it needs to be.

It’s common knowledge that helping employees set and reach goals is a critical part of every manager’s job. Employees want to see how their work contributes to larger corporate objectives, and setting the right targets makes this connection explicit for them, and for you, as their manager. Goal-setting is particularly important as a mechanism for […]

If you have criticism to deliver, just cut to the chase.

Lots of companies are recognizing that it makes sense to get older and younger employees talking – sharing knowledge and ideas, combining perspectives in new and interesting ways. But most are going about it in ways that are pretty old school – top-down, highly managed and overly scheduled approaches to building relationships that need, over […]

Approach the situation with curiosity, not blame.

When I met for lunch with Dr. Phil Zimbardo, the former president of the American Psychological Association, I knew him primarily as the mastermind behind The Stanford Prison Experiment. In the summer of 1971, Zimbardo took healthy Stanford students, gave them roles as either guards or inmates, and placed them in a makeshift prison in […]

Managing stakeholder expectations is one of the most challenging parts of the job. Here are five ways to do so successfully.

Show your colleagues that you appreciate their candor.

"To create a reliable 360 survey," Marcus Buckingham concludes in his recent blog on this site, "The Fatal Flaws With 360 Surveys," all you need do is...ask...

How to decline without causing offense.

Yes. There are good reasons to differentiate between how you treat people. If you do it right, you’ll see the results in improved organizational performance. by Lauren Keller Johnson

When most organizations strive to increase collaboration, they approach it too narrowly: as a value to cultivate--not a skill to teach. So they create...

Okay, let’s say you and a few colleagues or friends have formed an informal peer coaching network dedicated to helping each other improve performance. What’s next? As I described in my last post, you can be either directive or nondirective in your coaching approach. Here, I’ll offer ideas for how you can increase your ability […]