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Joe McCafferty

Communicating During Change Initiatives

We often observe leaders struggling with how to be transparent with their team during times of change. They often feel anxious about how answering questions about change management initiatives. While it might not always be possible to explain “what” is going on, we believe that explaining “why” is usually far more important; and often easier.

Managing Change isn’t Enough, You Also Have to Lead Transitions

In his landmark books about managing change, William Bridges made a distinction between “changes” and “transitions”. According to his definition, a “change” is something that happens. On the other hand, “transition,” refers to the process we go through to learn how to deal with change. Changes can be planned, executed and managed, but transitions require leaders to address the human element of their organizations. We frequently find our clients overly focused on change management and often not paying enough attention to transition leadership.

Why You Should Teach People in the Way They Learn

Recently I read this CLO article that discusses corporate training and suggests that we need to think about how we train people in the workplace. I agree.When Tandem Solutions launched our LongitudinaLearningTM practice a dozen or so years ago, we borrowed heavily from adult learning theory, which has been documenting and researching the way adults learn for at least 50 years

Three Critical Components of a Successful Performance Review

We have written about splitting the performance evalation from a discussion about pay raises. We've also floated the idea of turing the annual performance review into ongoing discussions about an employee's performance. All of these ideas are meant to help tie an individual's performance to the company's performance.

Maybe Performance Reviews Should Remain a Little Anti-Social

Twitter just turned 8. Facebook, 10. LinkedIn is 11, believe it or not. And if Pinterest were a person, it wouldn’t be old enough to go to kindergarten. Current performance management theory, on the other hand, is well into middle age. Social media is the cool kid on the block. And a lot of companies have jumped on the social media bandwagon for a number of its processes: customer service, marketing, hiring, even coding. Now, social media is creeping its way into performance management. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing

Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Pay and Performance Need to Consciously Uncouple

Pay for performance is a popular mantra in business today. And with good reason; it’s a sound concept to pay top performers more than those who aren’t performing as well. But while we want to reward top performers, we also want to make sure managers maintain their ability to use discussions like the annual performance review to effectively coach employees and influence their future performance.

Multi-rater Feedback

360 assessments have become a common tool for helping executives improve self-awareness and clarify development goals. However, our clients are often frustrated when 360 assessments identify development opportunities that are not directly in line with their company’s strategy or values. Too many clients rely on externally developed assessments for their 360 evaluations which makes it hard to connect the dots between the 360 feedback and the goals of the organization. You wouldn’t use someone else’s strategy, so why are you using someone else’s 360 assessment?