Written by: Steve Graham As a coach, I often work with clients who are needy for knowledge. They desire to grow professionally and often feel stuck in their current work environment. It is no secret that when an organization values developing their people, the benefits for both the employee and organization are numerous. The benefits often include: lower turnover, increased engagement, and a smarter workforce. Professional development goes beyond cookie-cutter training programs. It involves a deeper commitment to learning. Learning can take various shapes within an organization. It can be organic, formalized, personalized, or on-demand. Whatever the shape, the approach
Most HR professionals and business leaders today are concerned about finding and keeping talent. If you are going to focus on one, I’d suggest you start first by focusing on retaining talent. Broadly, the best way to retain talent is to create an environment where people have key needs met. These needs are described in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. They are 1) The need to direct their own lives 2) The desire to do better for ourselves and our world 3) To learn and create new things. But given these three things, what are some practices that can actually be
In 2003 I got one of those calls every child dreads. My mother was in the hospital and being rushed into emergency surgery. Turned out she had an allergic reaction to a medication and it almost killed her. She was at work when she started to notice something wasn’t right and within a matter of a couple of hours, her hands swelled up so much that she had to have emergency surgery to cut her hands open to relieve the pressure. She ended up with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and was in the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit for almost a week. Her
“Mom, I made a connection!” we hear our son say quite frequently now. We didn’t teach him about “connections” so someone at school must be talking about paying attention to be able to make connections between information and learning. For example, a couple of weeks ago they read a book about Rosie an Engineer and then “engineered” a plane to see if it would fly. He loved it- the building the plane part, not the reading ☺ This past weekend, he was playing in the front yard and came running in. “Mom, Mom! Come outside, I need to show you
I always seem to get the best insights into my children’s minds from the front seat of the car when they don’t think I’m listening. It usually comes in the form of backseat dialogue between themselves and a friend. One particular day driving to baseball practice, a friend of my son’s was with us and he out of the blue stated, “I want to be a lawyer when I grow up.” My son responded, “Why?” “So I can make a bunch of money,” he said. I guess my son saw this as an invitation to declare what he wanted to