Today's business environment is undergoing many changes that are having a considerable impact on the quantity and quality of leadership talent. Businesses are faced with a large number of retirees, a lack of viable successors, diminishing leadership development budgets, and leadership development practices often focused on training rather than individualized accelerated development options, such as executive coaching. When implemented correctly, executive coaching can have a significant effect on a leader's development as well as on the corporation as a whole....

HPI - Up Close and Personal By Patricia S. Radakovich, CPLP, CPT Human performance improvement (HPI) is typically applied to business. However, amidst all of our resolutions for 2011, I thought it would be interesting to look at how HPI can be applied to making improvements in our personal businesses and lives. Practice what you preach First, you should ask yourself if you practice what you preach. Do you apply HPI to your own business? When I asked this question of my colleagues some years ago, the typical answer was, "Of course I do!... Well, for the most part...

A corporate crisis of any kind puts a strain on customer relationships. Customers' reactions range from providing a show of faith for the organization to having questions that need answering to deciding to end their relationship. Time is essential. Once a crisis strikes, innovative approaches are required given the increased complexity employees face along with the lack of time available to dedicate to formal learning. When these innovative approaches are implemented as part of a customer retention plan, they can significantly solidify credibility and...

When I think about the people I most admire, I realize that many of them model coachability in ways that make them seem wise. That's an interesting concept, isn't it? That being coachable (a learner) might make us seem wise (someone who knows). It is not the acquisition of knowledge, facts, or experience that distinguishes us, but our unending quest for learning and our openness to improving. If you want to be the best possible coach, you need to be highly coachable. Many moons ago, I set out to do a master's thesis on coachability. My premise was that...

  Q. Is coaching a never-ending process? DL: Yes, as long as the person coached is engaging in what Tom Peters referred to as "The pursuit of excellence." If the person is no longer committed to excellence, then the game is effectively over. JK: I would agree. Does Bill Gates still need to be coached? Absolutely. DL: Bill Gates has a coach. Warren Buffet is his coach. Q. The pursuit of excellence can be difficult to sustain. Many people get up to a certain point in their life, experience a certain amount of success, and then "coast" a bit. JK: Yes. That's the...

In the late 1990s, I helped start a management consulting firm called "The Table Group." which provides a variety of services to a wide range of clients in just about every respectable industry imaginable. From the beginning we adopted a simple informal approach to serving clients that provoked surprising levels of loyalty and trust. My new book, Getting Naked: A Business Fable About the Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty, details that approach and calls for consultants to shed many of the behaviors and attitudes typical of the consulting industry. The...

At its heart, coaching is about change. And as most organizational learning professionals know, goals for learning and change go hand in hand. So how can coaching advance the goals for workplace learning? Recent research in the neurosciences has shown that it doesn't take as long to neurologically create new thinking patterns and new habits as we previously thought. Positive feedback and continuous reinforcement make a tremendous difference in helping people hardwire these desirable changes in the brain and sustain them over the long term. Numerous change...

However disorienting and maddening the pace and rules of our contemporary work life may be, let's understand a few things: There's no turning back, it doesn't have to be bad, and there are things you can do to set yourself up for success even in the face of multiple challenges. A mobile workforce will be the norm, not the exception. Here are 10 strategies to help you: 1. Focus on building relationships. You are now in the business of managing relationships. Once a quarter, audit your time. How often do you engage in activities meant to foster strong relationships...

In a world where it's often who you know not what you know that matters, organizations and employees suffer. Employees who receive preferential treatment are never forced to experience the cultural learning curve while those not on the receiving end are not afforded opportunities to flourish and often experience stagnation. While employee issues are always at the center of organizational productivity, eliminating special treatment in the workplace offers great returns. Preferential treatment in essence means respecting one person above another. Unfortunately,...

You know that moment when a boss appears to be bearing down on you, nitpicking, or just plain in your business? Your insides tie into knots and you feel your blood pressure rise. Inside your head, a voice screams, "Why don't you just leave me alone and let me do my job?!" If this has happened to you, then you know what it feels like to be micromanaged. Perhaps you've risen in your career to the point of managing others, and are wondering if you've turned into that type of boss. When you ask your people questions about projects you have delegated to them do you...

Of all the steps up the business ladder, the move from seasoned professional to frontline management is the most difficult, according to an Equation Research survey that asked HR and learning professionals which career transition is most difficult for employees. The survey results appeared in the July 2007 edition of T+D: Sixty-five percent is a pretty big number! I'd always suspected the jump to frontline management was the most difficult, but I would not have guessed by that margin. I believe this transition is difficult because of the natural tendency of the...

As a training and development professional, you probably have been asked this question more than once: What is the difference between management and leadership? My perspective on this might differ from yours or from what you have heard or read in leadership books. First, I don't believe that management and leadership are different positions or jobs. Many companies distinguish managers and leaders based on their pecking order in the organization. This seems like nonsense to me because we can see and experience leadership at all levels within an organization. Some...

A quick look at the literature on leadership theories shows how this field has been under constant change--from trait theories of leadership, where leaders were defined based on their exhibited traits, to contingency and situational leadership theories, where leaders' success was attributed to the interplay of their personal qualities with the organizational context, and finally to servant-leadership or post-heroic leadership theories being proposed now in which a leader is seen as one who carries forward the people to help them achieve what they want to achieve....

It doesn't take charisma to create a highly motivating work environment. In fact, charisma is not all it is cracked up to be. It's overrated, an excellent motivator doesn't need it, and sometimes it causes more harm than good. Managers can be excellent motivators even if they are shy or unable to give inspiring speeches. So what does it take to truly motivate employees? While preparing my latest book, The Manager as Motivator, I found seven easy-to-understand principles that managers can apply in the workplace every day. They are all based on research and real...

Do you ever think about lemons? In my work as a consultant, trainer, and coach, I think about lemons everyday. Some would say that the contemplation of lemons qualifies me for psychiatric evaluation, but before you rush to judgment, let me tell you how my thinking about this little yellow fruit has evolved. At first, I only considered the lemon for its domestic use: as a weak acid, a mild bleach, marinade, a humble garnish, a source of juice and flavoring. As I grew older and wiser, I began to consider lemons as those instances where I goofed. Small mistakes or...

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team underscores the effectiveness of storytelling in communicating a message. Author Patrick Lencioni describes how the executive team at DecisionTech, a startup Silicon Valley firm, turned around the dwindling company fortunes. Backed by a strong suite of venture capitalists, the problem with DecisionTech was not cash. It was not talent either. The leadership team included some of the most accomplished individuals in the hi-tech industry. The issue that was limiting the future of the otherwise well-resourced organization was a...

According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, annual spending on executive coaching among U.S. organizations has exceeded $1 billion annually. Yet at the same time, specific information about coaching's effectiveness is scarce and unreliable. It has yet to be demonstrated conclusively what qualifies an executive coach or what makes one approach to executive coaching better than another. Frequently, organizations fail to establish contracts or methods to define expected results from coaching engagements. One of the greatest advantages of hiring an...

Coaching has become a key element in most leadership development initiatives. Once conceived of as training reserved for only a few individuals at the apex of the organization chart, it is available to a much broader segment of the leadership team. A growing body of empirical data confirms the positive effect of coaching. Analysis confirms that effective coaches have employees who are confident that the organization will achieve its strategic goals. Alternatively, ineffective coaches have employees who are twice as likely to think about quitting their jobs. But...

I'm on my way to Philadelphia and wondering if I remembered to let the dog in before I left. Like most people, leaving my house to go to work involves steps and passages, lists and projections, chores and ideas. I like going to work. I've been doing the same thing since 1995. But I haven't been doing the same thing. I've been growing professionally and personally, developing skills, offering them to the world, finding places where they fit. I am a coach: personal, life, executive, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. One of the skills that I have built...

Members of the Institute of Executive Development conducted an online survey in 2005 on executive coaching. More than 200 individuals participated including practitioners, service providers, and academics from a variety of organizations from 12 distinct industries. Some companies that participated include ADP, Allstate Insurance, Capital One, and Motorola. The survey results indicate that the popularity of coaching in the last few years represents the beginning of continued growth for the field, and many organizations expect to spend more on coaching in the next...