Everything in coaching hinges on listening – it is the key to the coaching session. Listening is also essential for personal and professional success. Even though we know listening is important – active listening is not always a common practice. Active listening shows respect and that you desire to learn and understand the speaker. Here …

A common misconception with employees and managers is that of the “paper trail.” It is believed that in order to make a termination decision, a manager must create this “paper trail” of documentations until they have enough evidence to satisfy the Human Resource (HR) Department. Unfortunately, this very notion typically brings great frustration to everyone …

There’s just no way to avoid it. You might fail with your social enterprise. Lose your shirt. Wish you’d never started it. There’s no safety net for social enterprise, and there never will be. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that half of business startups with employees are gone five years later. Social enterprises probably do …

What’s the difference between a code of conduct and a rulebook? A rulebook certainly sets outer parameters as what is unacceptable behavior. However, since most behavior is within those legal parameters, does (and should) a code of conduct dictate how employees should in fact conduct themselves at work? Imagine if a supervisor asks an employee …

Throughout the whole of my career, I have come across a few great project managers. These are people who actually deliver a project, which is very much a success, and broadly gets delivered within the key mainstream delivery targets. But, the key question in my mind is why are they great project managers? What makes …

We’re Tom Vaughton and Dan Collins from team performance experts Fresh Tracks, who run team building events, team development programmes and staff conferences, and we’re the co-hosts of this blog. You can read more about us next to our pictures in the sidebar. This blog will be about various aspects of team performance, team building …

Welcome to Crisis Management in the 21st Century and to Internet: The Ultimate Medium. A cross between tabloid journalism and a gladiator competition, between Pollyanna and Pandora, where minds meet and merge, clash and clamor, and where you can get more of anything you want than was EVER available at Alice’s Restaurant. The Internet has …

In my travels around the country providing workshops on the topic of working spiritually, I’ve found consistently that people are looking for ways to have their work make a difference and to feel energized in a richer way in their work. I want to explore here a few ways that you might examine spirituality in …

Welcome to the new Customer Service discussion: Servicing a customer is a part of every purchase and interaction with internal and external contacts. It can last a few seconds up to hours. So if we all do it and experience it everyday in almost everything we do, why isn’t good customer service the norm? We …

Navigating the Different Stages of Crisis What do September 11, Enron, and the news about sexual molestation by Catholic priests have in common? They were all that I’ve previously termed “creeping crises,” vulnerabilities, bombs (literally and figuratively) waiting to explode. There were people — the American intelligence community, some employees of Enron, and Church leaders, …