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Leadership Development

We leadership development by clarifying important concepts and helping leaders put those ideas into practice.  Our approach places strong emphasis on building self-awareness and adapting a leadership mindset.  We work with leaders at all levels to help them develop the skills they need to succeed.

Leaders Look Up!

When coaching new leaders, I frequently hear them tell me how overwhelmed they are with work and how difficult it is to get it all done. We sometimes talk about managing time, and delegating effectively as a means to “free up” time. At some point in the conversation, I usually ask where they want to be or what their team will be focused on in 2 or 3 years. Common responses include blank stares, or fumbling around to answer, or even admission that they just don’t know. The challenge here is that if the leader of a team doesn’t have clear direction for where it needs to go, it’s pretty much impossible to tell if you’re on the right track.

Time Management: Maybe It’s the Archer, not the Arrows

We often hear from new leaders that things like Email, instant messaging, and even cell phones, are the bane of their existence. It’s hard to list all the benefits these electronic tools have provided, and yet many curse them for making life so busy and these tools are frequently on the short list of reasons why leaders have no control over their time. One of the biggest benefits of these tools is also the biggest issue: they have enabled instant response. This is a tremendous benefit, but it also leads to the problematic expectation that we will always get this type of response.

Shifting your Mindset from Peer to Leader

Being promoted into a role that requires supervising a group of former peers is a common challenge. At the core of this challenge is the shift from a focus on the work to a focus on the team. Folks tend to think about the value they add to getting the work done, as in: “My job is to delegate effectively so that all the work stays on schedule;” or “I’m responsible for making sure the team is producing quality outputs.” These ideas aren’t necessarily wrong. However, while technical capabilities may have gotten someone to where they are, it’s likely that they are not enough to continue to propel someone’s career as a leader.

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

It’s Time to End the One and Done Performance Review

What’s the purpose of a performance review? If you think it’s about documenting a discussion in your HR system, then you’re missing the point. That’s why there’s a lot of buzz about getting rid of the annual performance review. Not so fast.

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?