For internal and external trainers. Customise and run world class, field tested training programs for your clients, including the very popular Everything DiSC® Management program…When it comes to understanding how to motivate ourselves and others, psychologists have been arguing the pros and cons of different theories for decades. Most of us have grown up on a diet of theories provided by such trailblazers as Maslow, McClelland, and Herzberg and more recently Robbins. But psychologists now tend to be in [...]
Continue Reading →
This article discusses accountability in organizations and how managers can shed the command and control aspects of the old style of accountability in favor of a more humane way of managing, which the author calls ‘ the new accountability’.
“Working for an organization should be an adventure, not an anxious discipline in which everybody [...]
Continue Reading →
Business planning has come of age. When Henry Mintzberg announced the death of strategic planning, corporate executives breathed a collective sigh of relief.
No more need to engage in centralized planning, with it’s tortuous reliance on data (which was never reliable in the first place), future gazing (which was the business version of astrological star [...]
Continue Reading →
If your team is not learning, they’re not growing…and as a consequence, your organization won’t grow. Sounds pretty simple and obvious. Yet how many organizations actually stunt their growth by not investing in learning and development? Worse still, how many organizations spend inordinate amounts of money and resources to attract talent, and then starve that [...]
Continue Reading →
Teamwork advocates will tell us that working as a team is the solution to all of our performance challenges. I’m not so sure. I think it depends on the situation or challenge.
Back in the 1800′s, when settlers were moving westwards across North America, they hired scouts who would head out in advance and collect [...]
Continue Reading →
As an executive leadership coach, I come across clients and coaches alike who have difficulty understanding the distinctions between being a coach, mentor or sponsor. It’s not surprising since these titles have evolved over time independent of each other and in a somewhat inconsistent manner.
Following is my (ever evolving) description of the three roles. I hope [...]
Continue Reading →
Strategy development can be a messy affair. In most scenarios, given the number of stakeholders involved in or affected by a strategic planning effort, there’s no doubt that you can potentially end up with a plan that is a convoluted, “please everyone” digest of hidden and not so hidden agendas. Unless of course you succeed [...]
Continue Reading →Early in my career as a corporate trainer, I had a profound experience. On the morning of the first day of a workshop, I was going through the process of eliciting each participant’s expectations for the workshop. The wall was beginning to fill up with flipcharts listing what participants wanted to get from the workshop. [...]
Continue Reading →Leadership Skills you MUST master…
Mastering certain leadership skills is vital to your success as a leader. While leadership traits such as character, integrity and authenticity are important, so too are leadership skills. But which ones are most important? Here, in no particular order, is my take on the five most important leadership skills you [...]
Continue Reading →
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:42 — 5.2MB)
Nowadays, organizations and even entire industries (e.g. healthcare, IT, high tech) are faced with human resource challenges that in many cases threaten their [...]
Continue Reading →
Work teams are wonderful creations…when they work. But when they don’t, it can feel like hell on earth. If your team is struggling, it’s probably because of inattention paid by you to one or more of these elements in The Team Functioning Trilogy:
Relationships: How you treat each other. Also how you treat other groups [...]
Continue Reading →
The father of modern quality, W. Edwards Deming was fond of saying “In God we trust, all others bring data”. And his proclamation was widely reported. What was less reported was another proclamation of his “Data will provide you with approximately 3% of what you really need to know”.
So how do you discover the [...]
Continue Reading →
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:31 — 6.9MB)
We had some friends over recently for dinner. It was a wonderfully sunny, warm day, and the conversation got going quickly. The chatter [...]
Continue Reading →Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB)
As a leader, one of your main challenges is to establish an organizational climate that sparks and sustains higher levels of alignment and performance, without burning out [...]
Continue Reading →
Experts such as Kaplan and Norton tell us that up to 70% of strategic plans fail at execution. This startling statistic catches most managers off guard. With such a dismal record, it’s no wonder many managers shy away from strategic planning altogether. There can be many reasons for this failure to execute, here are my [...]
Continue Reading →Call Us
Toll free 1-877-432-8182
Edmonton 780-432-8182
