Trust. The Missing Metric.

When Peter Drucker said, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." he was, in essence, advocating a cure for mediocrity through better metrics. Unfortunately, he didn't specify what should be measured. Devan was excited about her promotion from leading a single team in the CS organization to Head of Customer Success at a remote-first enterprise software company. Her former CS team consistently outperformed the other teams in the group across customer…

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8 November 2020

Coaching / Leadership

Stop the Silent Startup Killers

In the medical world, “silent killers” are conditions with no obvious symptoms that progress to an advanced stage before someone discovers them. In organizations and on teams, a lack of psychological safety, unconscious bias, and low trust are “silent killers” that slowly drain away energy, engagement, and the human spirit — often going undetected until the damage becomes irreparable. Ignoring these silent killers is toxic for teams and life-threatening for startups. Leaders who…

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9 September 2019

Coaching / Leadership

Stop Wasting Money on Leader Training

In a hyper-competitive, global environment organizational leaders know that they must develop their managers and teams or risk being out-innovated and outperformed in record time. Yet, despite the billions of dollars spent every year on leader training, there is a continual flow of evidence from consultancies and academia that training fails to deliver against expectations. Recent articles from Gallup - “Why Manager Development Programs Aren’t Working” , McKinsey, and HBR all emphasize the…

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5 August 2019

Coaching / Leadership / Performance / Team Research

Coaching Strategies to Improve Team Effectiveness

In increasingly dynamic, complex business environments, helping people develop their strengths, build new competencies, and work collaboratively to deliver results has become a business imperative. In response, many organizations make significant investments in executive-level coaching. This coaching is typically provided by external groups focused on developing behaviors to improve senior-level teams and individual career prospects. While important, this top-focused approach leaves the fate of the coaching that occurs between hundreds of thousands of…

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15 April 2018

Communications / Team Research

The Importance of Transformational Team Communications

Complex global business environments, and the need for agility in both decision making and execution, are driving organizations towards ever greater collaboration and teamwork as the means of resolving challenges and creating competitive advantage. Most leaders agree that one key component in ensuring effective team functioning is the content and quality of communications to, and among, team members. Interestingly, I found – in both my work with teams and my research on team…

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25 March 2018

Coaching

Training vs. Coaching: Which Path to Developing Better Teams?

During my 25-plus years in large organizations, I have participated in dozens of leadership training sessions, along with a handful of leadership coaching experiences. Reflecting on those many training sessions, I struggle to recall many ideas that drove actions that led to meaningful, measurable results on my team or teams around me. In contrast, nearly 25 years ago, I received intensive coaching during the Center for Creative Leadership's week-long Leadership Development Program (LDP)…

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17 September 2017

Coaching / Team Research

Current Research: Does Team Coaching Work?

The 1950's witnessed the birth of a number of seminal business ideas, including the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis; the Strategy Grid; Management by Objectives (MBO); and coaching as a managerial activity. It took another 20-plus years for coaching to move into the mainstream, though it was primarily focused on executive-level individuals. Driven by globalization, the reduction of hierarchy with a shift to team-based organizations, and the work expectations of Millennials…

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16 September 2017