Coaching your employees requires commitment. It must be planned in advance, not done off the cuff.
Management today is really about enabling people to succeed and that means providing them with the guidance, resources, feedback and support they need to do their jobs.
Coupling feedback with expectations is the foundation of manager-to-employee coaching. It’s also the method by which managers can help employees and teams get the work done and promote higher levels of engagement and productivity. (read more…)
We are entering the time of commencement speeches. Some may go viral while others will evaporate as soon as the words are spoken. It is an important time, nonetheless, as a younger generation enters the next phase of their life and leadership path.
A millennial leader address to other leaders
It might be interesting to switch the roles. Rather than an audience filled with newly minted graduates, let’s make the audience today’s leaders, consisting of Boomers, Generation X and the Silent Generation. The commencement address is given by a millennial (Generation Y) leader. What words of wisdom would a millennial pass on to older leaders? It might go something like this:
Welcome to this graduation as we move from one generation to the next. As I look around the audience, I see hands and faces wrinkled by the experiences of time, showing the shock of challenges unforeseen and successes big and small. (read more…)
How unfortunate that our popular ideas of what a good leader should be are so often grandiose. Through current media, television and movies, we expect perfection; a leader is strong, fearless and flawless. If we believe that myth, they should be superheroes, royalty and saviors all rolled into one.
So we become disappointed when our leaders reveal themselves only human. Could it be that we expect too much? If you consider some recent examples of leaders who’ve fallen from grace, you might find that they made very human mistakes, the kind we all make. That isn’t an excuse for bad behaviors; it’s simply a reality that nobody is perfect.
In the end, the best leaders are very human. Like most of us, they don’t see themselves in some grandiose, bigger-than-life way. They know that it’s the little things that will make a difference in their leadership, and they work on getting better at them every day. (read more…)
When I first heard about 360-degree feedback, it reminded me of those horrible slam books from middle school. The ones that kids taunt one another with by anonymously adding their opinions of a peer into a spiral notebook that then gets furiously passed around at lunch.
My imagined nightmare is not that much of a stretch, considering that the fundamentals of 360-degree feedback consist of people throughout a company (salaried and hourly employees, CEOs, supervisors) who all anonymously tell X worker what they think of his/her performance. Sounds pretty horrifying, right?
Well, before you resort to hiding in your locker, consider the one group that could be greatly served by 360-degree feedback — the managers. The purpose of a manger is to effectively communicate with the team, be a middleman (or woman), oversee projects and implement order. Having a touchstone to the effectiveness of those efforts would not be the worst thing in the world. (read more…)
Picture this: You’re at a conference, waiting to hear a speaker whose talk you’ve been looking forward to for months. As you sit down, you realize that he appears rattled and is gripping onto the lectern for dear life. He begins to talk, ever so slowly.
You wait a while to see if his talk improves but it becomes decidedly boring. Now you’re dreaming of a coffee break. If this sounds familiar (or if you’ve been in that position), there’s hope. No matter whether you’re presenting to an audience of one or to a crowd of 100, these tried-and-true tips will ensure you’re ready to roll the next time you present.
- Start with a bang. During last year’s Tropical Storm Isaac, I was rerouted on my less-than-favorite airline. All went smoothly, at least until I emerged from the plane, uh, bitten. I was a little panicked upon discovering that a few sneaky little critters had apparently been my seatmates, and airline personnel were, well, unconcerned.
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