I’ve worked with well-meaning, highly-principled leaders and managers for years. When the topic of coaching and developing their employees comes up, I often hear that they know coaching is important, they want to coach more, but they don’t have time because they are too busy “putting out fires.” The pandemic put many leaders in crisis mode,

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Of all the jobs a leader has, coaching their team members is at the top of the list, yet one they feel the least comfortable with. This isn’t surprising, since even under “normal” conditions, it’s part of the job we always feel we could do better. Coaching at a distance can seem even more intimidating.

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When we give feedback, it is with the hope that the person on the receiving end will take action on that feedback. But giving feedback isn’t a one-and-done action. It’s a journey that has many steps along the way. So before we (or should I say ‘they’) get to action, we must realize the emotions

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Empowerment is a great thing, especially during times of change, upheaval and disruption. Empowered employees show greater commitment, stay more engaged, and create better results. Empowered employees take more initiative and get more done than employees who work in a fear-based, command-and-control environment. As a new supervisor, you hear and read about these organizational performance

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There are tons of tips out there for delivering feedback. The problem is that tips are only tactics until we start with the basics. First, we must understand the goal of feedback which is that the other person will take action on that feedback. And then, we have to ensure that the feedback is actually

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About two weeks into the shutdown, I was having a conversation with my neighbor (at a safe, 6-foot distance, of course). His organization had recently sent all of their employees home and when I asked him how it was going, I got a response that no leader ever wants to hear… It’s going…OK. As leaders,

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Most people right now are feeling the full weight of the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re anxious or scared. They may be feeling frustrated with the stay at home measures. Some are experiencing financial problems. Some may have even lost a loved one to the virus. Most of us are dealing with emotional highs and lows, and

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While in some cases people may not be getting enough feedback of any kind, you can rest assured that most of it isn’t effective feedback. It doesn’t matter where people are working, there is a serious shortage of effective feedback in the workplace today. We can’t fix that shortage globally, but we can address it

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If, for the first time, you are managing employees who now must work from home, or you have been managing at least some remote workers for a while now, Jono Bacon, management strategy consultant, speaker,and author, shares some insight for doing so successfully in this guest post.  Before the pandemic, 70% of professionals worked from

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My daughter returned home (early!) from her study abroad in Hungary on Monday. Recently, she was in London and toured Churchill’s underground war rooms. While there, she bought me this postcard. During the crisis of World War 2, Churchill said this to the people of Great Britain. Let us move forward together. Today as we

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