Coaching, Training, & Talent Development

The Power and Practice of Follow-up

So what makes some training work and other training fail? Find out what separates training and development programs that succeed from those that don’t, how coaching plays a critical role in workplace learning, and how to conduct effective follow-up sessions with your employees.

How to Turn Around a Struggling Team

Scott manages an underperforming team—but not for long. He has a plan to turn things around. First, he observes and interviews his employees. For the low and average performers, which are most of the team, he identifies skills and knowledge gaps. Paul is disorganized. Jill talks excessively and doesn’t listen. And even Kathy, one of his stars, has great technical skills but can’t seem to hit project deadlines. In this Quick Take you will learn what research reveals about the best way to turn around a low-performing team, why efforts to improve deficits can backfire, and where to focus your coaching efforts to get the best results.

Your Mindset Makes All the Difference

A 'fixed' mindset is the belief that people’s abilities and talents are relatively static and cannot be improved in any meaningful way. A 'growth' mindset is the belief that innate talents are just a starting point – and that people can improve and grow over time if they work at it. In this Quick Take you will learn what studies reveal about the connection between coaching outcomes and a coach’s mindset about learning, how a change in mindset leads to more effective coaching, and five keys to success in a coaching role.

How to Harness Peer Learning in Group Sessions

Compared with one-on-one coaching, group learning may seem like a compromise. It’s a time-efficient way to get across basic concepts and need-to-know information, but it’s certainly not the same as an expert working individually with an employee on high-level skills – right? Right. It’s not the same. It’s often better. In this Quick Take you will learn what research says about the power of group learning sessions, why peers are often better coaches than bosses or other experts, and how to design high-impact group-learning sessions for your team.

How to Help Employees Bounce Back After Failure

Some people bounce back from mistakes – even big mistakes – with grit and resolve. Others feel crushed, lose confidence and stop doing the things that made them successful. They may even quit their job or change careers – with potentially devastating consequences for both the employee and your organization. In this Quick Take, you will learn what works to help employees recover from failure – and what doesn’t work, how you can encourage people to forgive themselves for failing -- while still holding them accountable, and a three-step model you can apply to help people bounce back.

Framing Corrective Feedback in a Positive Way

Bill has an employee with a serious performance issue. Bill sincerely wants to help and considers a very direct corrective-feedback approach -- for example, saying something like this: 'I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t tell you you’re failing, and that you’re going to lose your job if you don’t improve.' But Bill also wonders whether that message might backfire, demoralizing the employee and making the performance problems worse. So what should Bill do? In this Quick Take you will learn how a coach can frame corrective feedback in a positive way, why that doesn’t mean sugarcoating bad news or pulling your punches, and, why this approach is far more likely to result in behavior change than traditional ways of delivering corrective feedback.

Why Goal-Setting Often Doesn’t Lead to Goal Achievement

How many times have you set a goal for yourself or your team that wasn't achieved? In this Quick Take you will learn why strong enthusiasm for reaching a goal isn't enough, the difference between 'goal intentions' and 'implementation intentions' and a simple research-proven technique that vastly increases goal achievement.

How to Offer Feedback That Actually Changes Behavior

In this Quick Take you will learn what a landmark research study says about what’s going on in people’s brains when they’re interacting with a coach, and a model that optimizes your chances of success when trying to change people’s behavior.

Coaching: Is It Okay To Let People Fail?

Nobody likes to fail. Nobody likes to see their people fail. And no enlightened manager would ever set up their employees to fail, right? Well, not quite. Research shows that in certain situations, you can help your employees succeed in the long run by putting them in situations where they’re almost sure to fail. In this Quick Take, you will learn the science behind the concept of “productive failure” – why struggle and failure help people learn more quickly and retain what they’ve learned longer, why managers are often reluctant to let their people fail – even when they should; and when it’s appropriate to use “productive failure” and when it’s not.

The Curse of Knowledge: Why it Hurts Training and How to Overcome it

Chances are at some point in your career you ran into an expert who struggled to teach others. They sped through difficult topics like they were a cinch. They used jargon learners didn’t understand. And, worst of all, they didn’t realize their audience was totally lost. Researchers call this phenomenon 'the curse of knowledge.' And it’s a big training and development challenge in all organizations, including yours. In this Quick Take you will learn why it's so hard for experts to share what they know, how to use the power of “near-peer” training to bridge the knowledge gap between experts and inexperienced learners and why near-peer training benefits everyone involved in training – experts, learners and the near-peers themselves.

Why 80% of Training Doesn’t Stick – And What You Can Do About It

Companies spend about $1,000 per employee on training. But 80% of the time it doesn’t stick. That’s a staggering amount of money going down the drain. But, here’s the good news: You can take steps to reduce that waste -- and as a manager or supervisor, you’re in the best position to fix it. More good news: If you can master the techniques covered in this program, you’ll transform your results and propel your managerial career into overdrive. In this Quick Take, you’ll learn why most training fails … and what you can do to make it succeed. However, the solution we describe will only work if you take action – and that’s the challenge.

Performance Feedback: The Seek-First-to-Understand Approach

Few employees like getting performance evaluations. The process often feels rigid, judgmental and de-humanizing. Most managers, of course, are obligated to give annual performance evaluations, and many would tell you it’s the thing they hate most about their job. Fortunately, there’s a better way that eases the pain for both managers and employees. In this Quick Take you will learn the Seek-First-to-Understand method for providing performance feedback, the #1 goal of performance feedback, and the most frequently overlooked stage in traditional performance appraisal processes.

Coaching: How to Help Employees Frame Setbacks in a Positive Way

University of Pennsylvania research reveals why some people face rejection so much better than others. Unsuccessful people engaged in negative self-talk, seeing their failure as personal (their fault) and pervasive. Successful people did the opposite, framing failure as something external to themselves and related to the specific situation. Learn how to coach your people using this powerful insight.
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