Dial Down the Overblown Ego

How often have you heard that our favorite topic is ourself? This is certainly true but a few people go overboard. We call them egocentric. At a neurotic level, they become narcissistic. This comes from the Greek character Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and remained there,…

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Criticism: Behind Closed Doors or in Plain Sight?

Nearly every company revolves around the central idea of team performance.  The synergy created by having multiple personalities and motivations can help any project be completed with efficiency and with quality results.  Naturally, there are some times when things may not go as smoothly as planned.  Indeed, if every effort always resulted in superior results,…

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Coaching a Manager Who is Too Tough

In a previous post we examined a manager who was too easy on his team. In many cases an assignment will come in to work with a manager who has the opposite challenge – he or she is too tough on employees. Often these hard-nosed managers tend to work long hours, do the work his…

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Coaching a Manager Who is Too Easy

The Plant Manager was becoming increasingly frustrated. His production manager was struggling to meet plant performance targets and was not getting his team to take ownership of achieving results. The initial diagnosis was that the production manager was being too easy on his team. As with most management problems, only two or three behaviours cause…

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Caught in the Chaos?

A manager or supervisor’s job should be easier. After all, as long as you have the right people, the right materials, the right information and the right equipment, everything goes smoothly. For most of us this fairy tale scenario only happens on occasion. The rest of the time we are scrambling because one or two…

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Accountability creates results and job satisfaction

Accountability becomes mission-critical in challenging times. We need everyone in our organization to take ownership of results and make things happen. Creating an environment of accountability rests with management. Based on our 22 years of experience in organizational development and leadership training, we have discovered that managers systematically remove accountability. As a result the manager…

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A Framework For Performance Management

City councils, boards of administrators and other governing systems demand a performance management framework that focuses on what outcomes employees will achieve, and how success is going to be measured. This tool reveals how to construct an integrated performance management framework that takes into account the many different functions which a city or a county…

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4 Steps to Effective Performance Management

The Institute for Corporate Productivity recently came out with four recommendations for putting in place an effective, robust process for managing and recognizing individual performance. Focusing, as is their wont, on the practices of high performing organizations, their research found that:

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