September has always seemed to me a time of beginnings. That feeling is no doubt a remnant of many years' experiences with starting school, and it’s also the feeling that accompanies transition from summer to fall (my favorite season!). It's a time for new backpacks, new sweaters, and new books (not-beach-reads), and a time for [...]
Over the last five months, I’ve been “blogging a book” on the leader’s role in developing people. Early on, I lamented that there wasn’t enough written on the subject, and called dibs on authoring a good book on the subject. In the meantime, I’ve run across Make Talent Your Business by Wendy Axelrod and Jeannie [...]
From CEO to front-line supervisor, making sure that people are honing their skills – and thereby ensuring the workforce has the capability to deliver on corporate goals and initiatives – is a primary accountability. And being effective in that role isn’t learned by osmosis any more than understanding a balance sheet or marketing tactics. We [...]
It’s counterintuitive, I know, but when we think about developing people, we should consider working on those areas in which they are already strong rather than their purported weaknesses. That’s a hard concept to reconcile when we are staring at the results of a competency assessment that has several clearly low-rated items. But unless those [...]
Humans are wondrously diverse. We differ by age, gender identity, race, sexual orientation, skin color, primary language, education, wealth, family make-up, neurological wiring, health, fitness level, geographic origin, religious affiliation, culture, and more. Our interests and hobbies vary, as do our political beliefs and the causes we support. We differ in how we think, how [...]
Imagine any scenario in which one of your employees needs to learn something, and you might guess that their first instinct will be to search the internet for relevant material. They put keywords into the search bar, hit enter, and instantly receive thousands of hits that might be useful. Yikes! They may start skimming over [...]
There is no doubt that interpersonal connections are critical to growth and innovation. Part of the origin story for Silicon Valley is a belief that many of the groundbreaking innovations born there were made possible by the close proximity of all those tech companies, which enabled employees in separate companies to interact with one another. [...]
As more employees work fully or partially remote on a permanent basis, leaders will need to step up in the ways that they connect people so that learning can thrive. As they say, that’s it – that’s the tweet. But since this is a blog, I’ll expand… One story of many I’m sure you can [...]
When you recall some of the most intense learning experiences of your working life, they are often associated with some big project or assignment that was at the edge of your comfort zone. Challenges are exciting – the work is new, you learn quickly and deeply, and the reward for success is great. But challenges [...]
One of the ways leaders coach others is by example – by demonstrating skills and attitudes. Often, you can show expertise in technical skills to people coming up behind you. But even if you don’t have your team’s full skill set, you can role model many other important skills – being a lifelong learner, acting [...]