About five years ago, the concept of focal jobs emerged. Advocates of this concept stressed the importance of identifying the most critical roles in a company and investing development dollars in these roles as well as rigorous planning for successors to the incumbents in these roles. Despite persuasive thought leadership in this arena, the focal…
Now that I have your attention, please listen carefully. Engaging and motivating people is not a transaction. It is a life long mission. Just like romance, an obvious point for anyone who has made a long-term relationship work successfully. I’m reminded of an incident early in my career. I had the good fortune at age…
Welcome to the StangerCarlson Talent Minute. I’m Carolyn Carlson. A few days ago I received an email from a former colleague of mine after listening to our last Talent Minute post –To be a Great Manager Develop your Coaching Success Competencies. I know that it was meant to be tongue and cheek however it was…
Earlier this week, I was talking to two company executives about strengthening team performance. They had already put substantial effort into this area and they were not getting results at the desired levels. Specifically, they had trained a large portion of the workforce on expected behaviors of team members and developed ways to measure demonstration…
We’ve been stressing the importance of teams to business success. The benefits of successful teams are clear: Diversity of thought contributing to stronger outcomes Innovation at levels well beyond individual capabilities Better business results Socialization of information to and from stakeholders Experiential learning which adds organizational capability Getting these benefits requires that your teams have…
Recently, I’ve been blogging about improving team performance. The focus has been internal teams, beginning with the senior leadership team. In fact, the principles of team performance improvement apply just as effectively to extended teams. Here are a couple of examples to consider: Consulting teams — When consulting firms do work for their clients, it…
Today, some helpful humor and a preview of thoughts to come. … I’ve been blogging about teams in several contexts: performance, assessments, team building and coaching. A key tenet of our perspective is the importance of the six core team competencies: engagement, collaboration, innovation, trust, empowerment and awareness. Since we’ve promoted these competencies, they’ve begun…
At StangerCarlson. we are constantly refining our approach to our leadership and talent offerings. Our executive and team coaching offerings have several unique characteristics, one of which is how we measure growth 90 days after coaching has finished. The purpose of this approach is to establish that growth and renewal are continuing beyond formal coaching.…
In the last few years, we’ve worked with several middle market companies to design or formalize their talent processes. Some of the companies have been global. There is a clear theme which emerges from this work: find out what’s being done well before beginning the work. A great example of this is performance management. Recently,…
Recently, I’ve stressed how important engagement is as a team competency and discussed how this competency can be developed. Equally important is not to behave in a way which destroys engagement — something leaders do all to often. Interestingly, the source of these damaging behaviors comes from a leading expert in marriage therapy rather than…