Successful teams are made up of individuals with unique ambitions, strengths, and personalities. The secret to being a great leader is the ability to identify and leverage these differences to create a complementary and motivated workforce. In the last few…
Performance Management
The Importance of Resilience
Note: This article is part of an occasional series dedicated to exploring the contribution of human capital assets (people!) to the valuation of a business. Welcome to The New ROI: Return on Individuals. Previous articles in the series can be found here. ∼∼∼∼∼ The ability to bounce back…
The U.K.’s Bradford Factor: A Tool for Monitoring Unplanned Absences
The “Bradford factor” describes the use of a special formula that calculates a score for each individual employee based on the amount of absences they have had, and the length of those absences. This formula is used in order to…
Get Better Ideas, Higher Engagement and Even Improve Your Managers By Encouraging 2-Way Feedback
Every successful relationship works via a careful process of give and take. We need to learn how to express ourselves, our ideas, and our interests. Equally, though, we need to really listen. Proactive listening can prevent a lot of issues…
Here’s Your Guide to Holding Effective One-on-Ones
One of the most under-appreciated tools of any manager’s toolkit is the one-on-one meeting. It’s a regular time for you to connect with each person reporting to you, get a sense of what they’re working on, where their priorities are,…
HR 101: What to Do When Performance Goes Bad
It’s time to pull your head out of the sand; you need to deal with poor performers! Sometimes it is uncomfortable to deal with things you would rather avoid, but there is no advantage to delaying the inevitable. If an…
Are You Ready For Feedback That’s Radically Transparent?
Here’s an actual email sent to Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, by an employee named Jim Haskel: Ray – You deserve a “D-” for your performance today in the meeting. You did not prepare at all, because there…
10 Commandments for Performance Discussions
I invested 38 years in the corporate world and my experience spanned a myriad of departments – to include human resources where I oversaw our leadership development program and played a critical role in personnel policy and practice. My time…
Why It’s A Mistake To Think Managers Are Effective Coaches
In 2015, Joseph R. Weintraub and James M. Hunt argued in the Harvard Business Review that there were two types of managers: those who coach and those who don’t. After years of researching the topic, they identified how the two…
Here’s How to Evaluate Manager Effectiveness
As global markets push businesses to become more agile and responsive, it’s tempting to predict that management roles will virtually disappear from progressive companies. But even Holacracy (a self-management structure made famous by online shoe retailer Zappos) has some hierarchy: Instead of “managers,”…
Great Managers Coach By Holding Up A Mirror
It’s no secret that the feedback we share with others fails to bring about positive and lasting change. By some estimates, people ignore our feedback nearly 70% of the time. There are lots of reasons why – it’s not specific, too infrequent, and…
Don’t Confuse KPIs and Analytics
Some companies tell me about their plans for people analytics and soon it becomes apparent that their mandate is something different: they’ve been asked to report KPIs. The difference between analytics and KPIs can be illustrated by how they think…
How to Give Negative Feedback In a Positive Way
Often I’ll have managers express reluctance to give performance improvement feedback to an employee who is either a great performer in general or an employee who did something well, but had a couple of areas where they could have done…
What to Do When You Need to Ignore Your Pay Survey
Data, data, data. We live, love and dream about data here at PayScale, and big data is driving business and pay decisions across industries and functions. But when it comes to data-based decision-making, there are a few occasions when decisions…
It Takes An ‘Awakening’ Before a Feedback Culture Can Flourish
Implementing a culture of feedback from scratch at a company is no simple task, especially if it hasn’t historically been a part of the company’s values. Too many times, managers and HR teams view feedback as a way to critique…
Firing a Toxic Leader Is Only the First Step to the Cure
Toxic leaders are narcissistic, abusive, single-mindedly self-promoting, inconsistent, and authoritarian. Their leadership styles are devoted to advancing their own interests at the expense of the institution and their coworkers. Hollywood has given us several iconic toxic leaders: Gordon Gekko in…
Improve Your Coaching Skills by Understanding the Psychology of Feedback
Do you ever wonder why it’s so difficult to give and receive feedback in the workplace? Many owners and managers struggle with pointing out areas of improvement for their employees. Employees, in turn, often have a hard time hearing they…
5 Mistakes Leaders Make That Cripple Teams
Leaders create the culture that helps their teams thrive –– or barely survive. Of course, no leader intentionally stymies or stalls a team. But even the strongest leaders may make mistakes that freeze their people rather than free them to…
Best of TLNT: 5 Behaviors That Build a Company’s Culture
Editor’s Note: It’s an annual tradition for TLNT to count down the most popular posts of the previous 12 months. We’re reposting each of the top 30 articles through January 2nd. This is No. 24 of 2017. You can find…
How to Get Started With Continuous Performance Management
It’s no surprise that performance reviews – across most businesses today – are changing. For years organizations have complained that performance management needs to evolve to deliver company-wide business value. In fact, studies show that only 6% of organizations believe…