Our previous post, “Leaders, Focus on Moving Your Middle – Play Offense, Not Defense”, emphasized the importance of focusing on moving your middle majority to high performers. But how do you do that?  How do you get your good players, or your B players, to become A players? They all can’t be converted, but those who have usually have a leader that: 1. Sets high expectations.   This comes in the form of setting challenging goals and holding people accountable to them. 2. After high expectations are set, the leader then provides Assurance and Confidence.  This involves saying things like,  “I know we’ve

Think about your family, organizations you volunteer with, the company you work for. How would you rate communication in each of these groups? Do the members of each of these groups communicate effectively with each other, or is something lacking? We learn to communicate from a very early age, learning to listen and speak as an infant and later on learning to read and write. However, even though we learn to communicate very early in our lives, many people have difficulty communicating effectively. As an HR professional, one of the complaints I hear most often from employees and leadership within

I was sitting in a multi-day training with a group of executive leaders. I had yet to put my finger on what was missing with this team, when a question was asked that made me realize, these people don’t know each other. Through this question, it became apparent that they aren’t “allowed” to put their guard down and be real. They don’t feel like they have permission to be vulnerable. Some of these people had been working together for ten plus years and were hard pressed to name any of their colleagues hobbies much less their co-workers spouse and/or kids’