Coaching Resources Consolidated
| You cannot repair every worker performance problem in your project. But all is not lost, you can assist the team leads or managers who are responsible to fix the performance problems. We have discussed previously in the Eye that people are promoted for doing well in skills that are used less than their new position. (You may recall me describing a study showed that better results are achieved by promoting people at random as opposed to promoting based on how well they did in the previous job.) This just adds to the need for coaching. Read more about how important coaching is now for your career improvement here (registration needed). And see how ADM implemented a huge coaching effort ("Coaching to Win") to improve annual performance management here (registration). So add coaching practice for project team leads to your training plan. Recognize that this may be a stretch for managers or team leads. A long, long stretch. They will need customized preparation and real practice to get it right. And consider these ideas:
Your Big Move: Improve your career by becoming an excellent coach yourself. This is a critical skill and growing more so as organizations mature away from command and control and into a collaborative culture. Need more help? Here are many additional resources just from gantthead. This should keep you busy for hours. Don't forget to keep track of your project. More about coaching on my Eye on the Workforce blog Taking Advantage of Coachable Moments You may not know this, but you miss out on coaching moments every day. These moments together are way more powerful than your formal annual or semi-annual performance reviews. Way more. Pricewaterhouse ... Better Skill Development: It Plays in Peoria The winner of the 2011 Optimus Award for Managing Change goes to the city of Peoria. The one in Arizona. Why? They created a registered apprenticeship program to develop in-house talent. ... I was recently reminded how coaching is the universal immediate performance-improving technique. It is so good that it does not have to be executed perfectly to be effective. Yet there is one way you ... An Experience You Don't Want to Duplicate Jim Clemmer, training consultant, recently wrote about how he didn't like experiential learning like wilderness experiences. While there are many workers that project managers would like to abandon in ... OK, check your judgment with this question: Which of these four performance management strategies was found to drive far more “business impact” than the others? (1) Cascading Goals: aligning goa ... Elsewhere on gantthead... Step Up and Coach Your Teams for Success! from Extraordinary Leader Coaching and mentoring is one the many aspects of a project/program managers responsibility. Great project /program managers will use various tools and techniques on their projects to acquire swift ... Project HEADWAY: The Project Manager as Coach - What's the Game Plan?
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been thinking a lot about the traits that successful coaches have in common. Its probably because college football season started a couple of weeks ago, but as ... Individual Performance Intervention Planner ( Specifications/Procedures - Template ) Before you go into a coaching meeting with a worker, make sure you are prepared for an uneventful discussion--or a lively one. To be effective, coaching must blend a working knowledge of the mechanics of a skill set with experience of exercising that skill set in real-life situations. And sometimes, the better coach will always know when it is time to take out a player Project Manager's Coaching Process Start-Up Guide ( Template ) This template has been designed to assist the project manager to prepare for the coaching process of one or more individuals. |
Sadly Only One In Four of These Is Essential For Work
Categories:
Communications Management
Categories: Communications Management
| A new survey reminds us of a problem that is so ubiquitous and so overpowering that we think there is nothing to be done and just suffer through it like morning traffic: The proliferation of email. Anytime you look at your Inbox you can see courtesy copies of updates you have only a slight connection to, messages with more personal content than business, conversations that are being sent to you for other's agendas, and all these covering up the few high-priority items that you'd love to find and deal with. The survey respondents reported that:
You don't want email jams to slow responses you are awaiting. You don't want important communications between teams to be lost in a sea of trivia. You don't want your words of wisdom to be missed. So what can you do? Here are some recommendations. In your emails:
In your project
These may inspire you to come up with even better ideas for your own situation. Is email proliferation a problem in your projects? What are you experiencing? |
Why You Should Care That Stars Suddenly Align for Mentoring
| Over recent weeks in The Eye, I have been covering many topics that may have seemed unrelated, but now as a group point to an effective workforce management strategy. Here's a list of the drivers:
Why You Should Care #1 You need workers with excellent skills to make your projects successful. The current environment is putting a constraint on your ability to field a project workforce with those skills. Some of the hardest skills for you to build are those of managers (including team leads) or of IT experts in rare skills who can train others. One solution to build these skills is through mentoring. Mentoring is a "informal training" that can be enabled by social tools and techniques available today. It allows an IT organization to quickly upgrade the skills of the many high performers ready to add more value to projects. While coaching is a technique suited for hard skills, mentoring is particularly suited for soft skills used by managers and leaders. In recent years mentoring has been growing up. For example, there is now at least one product (from Nobscot Corp) that matches mentors and protégés based on mutual professional interests similar to the services that match couples. You can read how one company used this product here (registration required). In any case a lot has been learned about what works and does not work in mentoring programs. See what Bloomberg and Harvard Business say here. Why You Should Care #2 You need some "you" time. That is, you need time away from the fires to enjoy being a protégé yourself, to do better in your career, especially to improve the types of projects you manage or to climb the career ladder. Don't wait for a program to be put in place if you do not have one, find a mentor! Make sure you are ready as a protégé with these basics. There has never been a better time than now to position yourself for career advancement! |
Are You Using High-Impact Learning?
| Learning is as important today to maintaining your workforce performance as it has ever been, and now we have better means of discovering what really works as new technology and techniques change the landscape. So you are keeping up with workplace learning technology, aren't you? OK, you might have a couple of other items on your plate and need a briefing. Answer this multiple choice question to get started on this update. Which of the following statements is/are true about high-impact learning organizations as compared with the national average?
(a) They have a higher training staff per worker As an IT project manager, it is important for you to move toward best practices because IT is at "full employment", the implication being that it is much easier for IT workers to move to another position outside of your organization that they feel is better. For example, they may choose an organization that helps them better improve their skills. At full employment you will find it very difficult to hire the skills you need. It is more efficient to build the skills you need in your existing workforce . So use best practices from those who have implemented them successfully: High-impact learning organizations. High-impact learning organizations have
Use similar tactics in your organization - or project - to increase the impact of your training dollars.
For more information, read the Bersin Learning Factbook summary. |
One Weird Fact About 80% of Your Workforce
| Previously in the Eye, we have covered the importance of carefully managing your best workers - the high performers. Recent research tells us that doing so may be more important than we thought. There is good news and bad news as a result of the study summarized in this National Public Radio story (listen or read, or check out the research abstract if you want more detail). The Good News: Many more people than expected are outstanding performers. Instead of what you would expect from a statistically normal distribution - a small percentage that is outstanding and most people simply average - perhaps 20% could be high performers. This was found across a variety of disciplines. The Bad News: Once we know that there are many more people far above average, that means more people must be below average. So there are many more people below average in your project than you previously thought possible. Or maybe you have already realized this must be true as you
More Good News: You have more excellent workers than you perhaps thought and there are more out there that you can hire. Get past the belief that there are only a few gems waiting for your discovery. Search broadly to find the better selection of candidates who will be productive in your project. More Bad News: The performance appraisal system used by your organization may be forcing a normal distribution on its workforce, de-motivating some of your best people and even causing them to leave. Look for these diamonds in the rough and be their supporter. You may be able to turn their performance around - and eliminate their bitter influence on the rest of your workers. How you deal with your own frustration is beyond the scope of this blog. In any case, look for restrictions or constraints on the performance of the outstanding workers in your project. Not sure what these restrictions and constraints are? Guess who you should ask. |
