Trick, Treat, or Train: 6 Resources for Scary Good Employee Engagement

Ding, dong, the witch is…hovering over your shoulder micromanaging your work!? This Halloween, instead of Trick or Treat, let’s Train. We’re highlighting two applications of training as an employee engagement solution, plus 6 links to related resources on The Point Blog.  Last week, Lorrie and I spoke about our Illuminate program at the University of Alabama’s HR Management Conference. Before the session, an attendee came up to chat with us about the HR horrors she’d been dealing with at her new company. Her scariest issue: employees’ fear of big, bad HR. She said she felt like the HR monster, scaring

The Crossover of Adaptive Leadership and Storytelling

I recently read an article by the Huntsville Business Journal about adaptive leadership, and I immediately sent it to everyone on the HPC team. I thought, “This is what we’re always talking about!! The HBJ gets it!!” We truly believe that leadership behaviors rooted in CODE have significantly higher impact, and we’re seeing this play out in a big way with one of our clients.  Four years ago, a client asked us to explore gender equality in their organization. This included analysis of leadership demographics, a comprehensive survey to all employees, and focus group discussions. During the study, some challenges

Bring Me a Rock

My husband has a great analogy for ineffective communication that goes like this:  It’s like when they say, “Bring me a rock”. You go outside, grab the first rock you see, and take it to them. They say “No, we need a different rock.” You go back outside, grab a different rock, take it back, and they say “No, not that rock. It needs to be gray.” And so on and so forth until you eventually figure out that they wanted a big, round, gray rock from the bottom of the Mississippi River. How were you supposed to know that?

How to Develop Inclusive Training

When was the last time someone asked you how you prefer to learn? Has someone ever asked if you need assistive technology?  As a trainer and facilitator, I definitely miss the mark sometimes on inclusive training. It’s hard. There’s no way around it; it’s not easy to design or deliver training in a language, structure, platform, etc. that works well for every learner. It’s hard, but it’s so important to try.  There is robust research out there about learning styles, learner variability, and inclusive curriculum design. Let’s look at this excerpt from research about Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a

Crafting a Thoughtful Performance Management System

I recently asked a room full of managers representing dozens of organizations if they actually liked their own company’s performance management system. What do you think they said?  Some of us may think of Performance Management as a rubber stamp on an annual review. We often don’t think of it as a living, breathing, system. Others of us may think of Performance Management as monitoring what we’re doing wrong. We may not think of it as monitoring and developing what we’re doing right.  When an organization thoughtfully designs, implements, and continuously improves a performance management system, it should look like