As we slowly make our way through the remaining weeks of the year, many organizations are now shifting their focus to an exercise that is often met with disdain and apprehension – the annual performance review. Regardless of whether you’re on the receiving or giving end, most of us tend to view these feedback exercises as unconstructive or a waste of time, in large part because we approach the conversation from the wrong vantage point. Participating at a recent awards gala for one of the regional high schools helped to not only shed some light on this issue, but also on how leaders can make the act of giving feedback to others more instructive and beneficial.

I was invited by the school principal to give a speech and help present awards as part of a ceremony to recognize students who had maintained a high academic standing throughout the previous school year. Although I was honoured and delighted to take part, I have to admit that I did feel some hesitation because I wasn’t an active member of this community when these students achieved these accomplishments. As such, I felt that any recognition on my part of their efforts wouldn’t exactly carry much weight because of that lack of connection.

So I decided to take another approach to my involvement where I used my role in this ceremony to serve as a source of encouragement and support for how these students could build on and attain a similar achievement over the course of the current academic year.

Following the ceremony, I was pleasantly surprised to hear from both the parents and the students of how much they appreciated my participation, and in particular the ideas I had shared in my speech and in the brief comments made to every student as they came up on stage to accept their award.

What I began to realize is that Click here to continue reading »”Are You Following These 3 Rules For Giving Effective Feedback?”

With the month of September now underway, there’s an unmistakable feeling of renewed energy and determination in the air. As children return back to their school routines and the summer break now nothing more than a fond memory, perhaps it’s only natural that there’s this collective drive to take on the challenges before us with spirited enthusiasm.

Of course, how organizations view challenges – either as an outcome of being in competition with others or as an opportunity to push themselves further in order to move one step closer to reaching their full potential – plays a key role in how they approach not only overcoming these obstacles, but the level of creativity and innovation they foster within their workforce.

With this in mind, here are four steps leaders can use to ensure their organizations are not simply reacting to what challenges come their way, but that they have a clear understanding of what their organization needs to do to succeed:

1. Set clear goals independent of what your competition is doing
When it comes to the ability to consistently surprise, delight, and transform customers into loyal advocates, there are few companies that succeed at this as well as Zappos and Apple. Their ability to “deliver happiness” and release unexpected ‘must-have’ technologies respectively, are clearly not mere responses to the challenges they incur from their competition. Instead, these measures are a result of addressing what goals they have for their organization, of what they wanted to create or accomplish that would make them stand out and succeed in their respective fields.

Take Apple, for instance. Can anyone say the iPod, iPhone and iPad were created in response to something their competition was doing? Or were they more in Click here to continue reading »”Are You Using These 4 Steps For Organizational Success?”

For the last few weeks I’ve been working with a client who has provided an interesting opportunity to examine one of the challenges leaders find themselves struggling with in today’s fast-paced business world. Tom* serves as one of the senior department heads at a mid-size technology firm, overseeing the development and marketing of some of his company’s key product lines.

On all accounts, Tom has consistently demonstrated the key traits of being an effective leader, as evidenced both in his performance reviews as well as in his team’s track record of successful product releases. However, on the heels of some rather lukewarm responses from both the market and industry critics to their latest efforts, Tom has been grappling with uncertainties over his ability to continue leading his team in the months ahead.

Although these recent developments haven’t lead to any negative reactions from senior management, Tom has nonetheless been feeling like he was thrown off the proverbial horse, despite the fact that his team remains determined to keep building on their past successes. The current situation has stirred up feelings of self-doubt in Tom; about whether he would be able to continue to successfully lead his team or even if he was still the right person for the job.

Through the course of our coaching sessions, we came up with a number of strategies Tom could use to help him overcome these feelings of self-doubt so he can continue to support his team as they push ahead.

Of course, Tom is not alone in feeling at times this sense of uncertainty over one’s ability to successfully lead those under their care.  With this in mind, here are some measures that can help others in leadership positions regain their footing onto more certain ground as they navigate their organization through this constantly-changing business environment. Click here to continue reading »”The One Challenge All Leaders Secretly Face”

With the arrival of another new year, many of us have been busy celebrating various traditions which serve to not only remind us of events from the past year, but which also imbue us with a sense of optimism for what we might achieve in the months ahead.

In the case of my family, our New Year’s Eve tradition stems back to when my wife and I were newlyweds, celebrating the start of a new year just a few short months after our wedding. As we had put most of our money into buying new furniture and appliances for our apartment, we didn’t have much money left to celebrate our first New Year’s Eve. Even though we couldn’t afford a night out on the town, my wife and I still wanted to do something special to celebrate this annual milestone.

So an hour or two before midnight, we left our apartment and walked down to our local convenience store and ‘treated’ ourselves to whatever junk food we felt like having – an assortment of sugary treats that brought back fond memories of our youth. We then returned to our apartment to enjoy our stash of potato chips and candies, ringing in the New Year with a toast of our favourite soda.

Although this wasn’t anything extravagant, it still felt nice to celebrate this event despite the constraints we faced. In the following years, we continued to celebrate New Year’s Eve with this ritual, mainly because this simple gesture connected us to those first months in our marriage. When we became parents, we had our children join us in this end-of-year ritual and in a very short time, it became their own end-of-year tradition as well.

In celebrating this annual New Year’s Eve tradition with my family, I thought about how organizations also have their own unique traditions. Although these might Click here to continue reading »”Celebrating The Traditions That Define Your Organization’s Culture”