Performance Management

I am a working actor and a working trainer. For both professions, you could say I am a performance critic. In my other life as a psychologist, I see a wide range of similarities. Instead of comparing business and theatre definitions of performance, I thought a good way to present this issue is to highlight …

Last November in honor of Thanksgiving, I discussed the need to practice gratitude in a post. Studies on gratitude show that people who practice it have lower levels of stress hormones in their blood, are in better physical health, sleep more and are happier (The Positivity Company). And while these benefits of gratitude affect the practitioner of gratitude(sometimes referred to as one having a gratitude attitude) they also have an impact on the receiver of the practice. As mentioned in my post last year, it creates a win-win. In HR we are often looking for the win-win and we spend hours trying to figure out ways in which to create it and build it into our cultures.

n the early days of my retail career, I knew I had reached the ultimate level of success, when I could leave on vacation and return to no other messages than, “welcome back.” See before I reached this point, I would come back to work (most of the time a day or two early just so I could what was really going on in my absence) and there would be a long list of things that I needed to handle; there would be all kinds of things ranging from angry customers, to incomplete projects, to a dirty store. Somewhere after years of getting frustrating by this, I figured out how to engage and develop a team of employees to give whatever was needed to get the job done. Up to that point, I had always been really good at setting expectations and keeping people focused at work while I was there, but what happened when I left?

GROUP DEVELOPMENT Below is an idea for a team building activity focusing on the what happens when new members join a team. Learning Objectives 1. To experience the process and feelings that arise when a new member joins an ongoing group with defined tasks and roles; 2. To explore the coping mechanisms adopted by the …

When trainers are finding ways of improving performance and leadership, there’s one topic we should cover but often don’t. How do we evaluate performance? It seems an obvious fit for us, but it’s a tough and touchy topic to train about. Although people are involved, the human resource methods seem set in stone. Usually where …

Learning requires action and sometimes failing. There are a number of failures that I have learned from throughout my career. One of the most painful for me was in my early days of multi-unit management. I had just been transferred for the first time out of my hometown to a new city with an entirely new group of stores, employees and customers. Coming into this new environment, I was a little cocky. I had been a rock star store manager and after my promotion, I led a rock star district of stores. My team was good and my stores were very profitable. So of course, I assumed if my new team wasn't comprised of rock stars, I could have that turned around in no time. Unfortunately, the time frame it took for that happen was quite a bit longer than I expected. The main reason, I thought it was about me and my talents. It wasn't. I took over a team of rock stars who just didn't know it yet. And everything I did when I got there communicated that they weren't.

I believed I was part of a group of people who had each other’s best interests as a core of operation. This group could best be classified as a Self-Managed Team where there was no distinct team leader, for example a string quartet. The group generally worked well together over a period of time, but …