Leadership Lessons
This is where we will share strategies, tips and insights on how you can align your organization for success.
Leaders Look Up!
One common challenge we see among new leaders is their ability to set clear, long term direction for their teams and help their team members understand how their day-to-day work connects to these overall goals. When coaching new leaders, I frequently hear them tell...
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...
Shifting your Mindset from Peer to Leader
Over the past few months I have had the opportunity to coach a number of individuals at various points in their transition from individual contributor to leader. Being promoted into a role that requires supervising a group of former peers is a common...
Coach Your Employees Beyond the Annual Review
According to the International Coach Federation, x% of managers coach only at the time of the annual review. And if the employee is lucky, the manager may have some discussions with the employee to check in as the year progresses. This is a lost...
Virtual Teams Have to Figure It Out for Themselves
When I was a child, my father would often give me advice and coaching. Sometimes I would take his advice and it would yield great results. More often I didn’t take his advice because as much as he was well intended, I didn’t think he really knew the answer...
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...
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...
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...
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. The purpose of a...
Three Critical Components of a Successful Performance Review
We’ve blogged about splitting the performance evaluation from a discussion about pay raises. We’ve also floated the idea of turning the annual performance review into ongoing discussions about an employee’s performance. All of these ideas are meant to help tie an...
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...
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...