With a growing need to manage project based work coupled with the need to vet an individual’s leadership capabilities, organizations are assigning hi-potentials with informal leadership roles, or project manager roles, before giving them the positional and formal leadership authority over others. As a chance to prove capabilities, those given project management roles need to understand how to succeed at both the task of getting the project done and the priority to get work done through others. Often these two priorities seem to be conflicting, when in reality they are not. Informal leaders often fail when they see the only
We’ve been doing a lot of research around the idea of a match.com for employers and employees here at Horizon Point. Let’s face it; behind a person’s choice of spouse, the choice of employer (both the organization and your boss) may very well be the most important choice you make in terms of overall satisfaction. One of our key questions around this idea is: What characteristics are most important in terms of employment marital bliss? Dating sites have isolated key variables leading to marital satisfaction by matching people correctly, can’t we get better at doing the same thing for employers
We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately related to performance evaluations. Specifically, these questions center on how to structure evaluation forms in a way that supports priorities of the organization and drives individual and, therefore, organizational performance. Of course, it’s really not about the form at all. It’s about knowing what drives the performance of your organization, translating that to individual metrics, then equipping leaders with the ability to focus on constant performance feedback. 1. Make it values based. Center your evaluation form around the values of your company not individual characteristics like “dependable”, “initiative”, “communication” etc. If you
I want to round out the goal setting discussion by focusing on the importance of feedback. To illustrate, feedback has played a critical role in a current client business coaching engagement. To begin the coaching process this past summer, we employed a 360° feedback mechanism to help set priorities for the client’s development. Feedback was first necessary to set goals and priorities. Based on areas for improvement, we developed four questions that she asks herself each and every day. These are all “yes” or “no” questions. (As example, a question I ask myself every day is “Did I do something to develop new business
In my last post, I talked about the importance of goal commitment when setting goals for yourself and/or those you lead. Today, I want to discuss the law of diminishing returns and how it relates to goal setting. I have honestly thought about a dozen different things that I want to focus on for the New Year, have you? The law of diminishing returns tells us that the more goals we set, the less likely we are to achieve them. One goal distracts from another, leaving us less likely to accomplish anything. From a personal perspective, one way to avoid