Lean manufacturing has been an attribute of progressive production systems for many years.  It was initiated as part of Toyota’s manufacturing process to eliminate waste and ultimately boost productivity and reduce costs.  In a recent edition of the Harvard Business Journal, contributor Steve Blank, discussed the use of lean techniques in entrepreneurial start ups.  Again within this context of lean, the argument is made that there are quicker more efficient ways of navigating the start up process that can lead to better outputs and ultimately speedier success.

To use the term Lean Coaching might almost sounds like an oxymoron to many. Read more »

According to Dan Pink in his book, Drive, there are three components to driving motivation within employees, namely Purpose, Mastery and Autonomy. He argues that essentially people want to understand how their role fits into the overall goal of the business, they need the skills to do it and finally they flourish when given the freedom to execute.

Purpose and Autonomy are pretty self explanatory so let’s explore Mastery in some further detail. Mastery does not imply that you must be the best or that you have Read more »

In a recent conversation with a student of one of our programs I was struck by the impact that some very fundamental tools of coaching had had. The student had shared how the clarity provided through this powerful process had led her to seriously reconsider some of the things she held as absolute in her life. When challenged to explain how this played out she described it as follows:

“It began with being asked very powerful open ended questions, no they were more than powerful, they were empowering, they were about me and they made me look deep inside Read more »

How do you get the most from your people? Billions of dollars are spent annually on an infinite variety of training programs in pursuit of answering this question. It is still one of the elusive components to running a business that owners and leaders struggle with.

Clearly when a new person is hired some fundamentals need to be put in place to attain an acceptable standard quickly. Let’s call this standard “functional” and once this is achieved the following basics are typically in place:

Skills, experience and Read more »

Each year corporations spend millions of dollars on various forms of professional development and the seemingly never ending debate ensues in terms of, what is the return on investment? For a long time this has always been difficult to determine because the benefits are not obviously tangible and most often cannot be expressed in financial terms. I suppose it’s akin to putting people “our most important asset” on the balance sheet. Alas that hasn’t happened yet either.

So in the absence of any financial accounting mechanisms employee engagement surveys have emerged as an objective basis to assessing the Read more »

Professional development is not an easy sell. In fact in many organizations, training is seen as a discretionary cost and, if budgets are tight, it is often one of the first things to be cut. This maybe perceived as understandable as often associated benefits are less tangible and impact is not typically immediate. Of course most progressive organizations recognize that their only way to get better is to invest in their people. After all that is what will keep them ahead of the competition.  Read more »

For many organizations annual budget preparations are beckoning and consequently for Human Resource leadership considering what to allocate for professional and organization development. Whether it’s through a talent management review, succession planning or some fundamental training needs analysis justifying precious financial resources for training is never an easy task.

So once the overall budget is agreed the bigger challenge becomes who will actually be conducting the training? When selecting a training organization here are a few tips to take into consideration to ensure you have what is most important – the right fit.

Quality of Content

It may seem obvious but Read more »

Many organizations are coming to the realization that the “wellness” of employees is a hugely significant business concern given the relative costs of health-care, absenteeism and turnover, not to mention reduced productivity. A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report revealed that work sites with wellness programs have:

Reduced health-care costs by up to 55% Reduced short-term sick leave by up to 32% Increased productivity by up to 52%

Finally organizations that promote employee health and well-being are 3½ times more likely to encourage creativity and innovation, according Read more »

In a recent Forbes article, it was claimed that the need for coaching within organizations is ever increasing yet for some reason managers are not truly embracing it. This same article also stated that according to the 2010 Executive Coaching Survey, conducted by the Conference Board, 63% of organizations use some form of internal coaching, and half of the rest plan to. Yet coaching is a small part of the job description for most managers. Nearly half spend less than 10% of their time coaching others.

In our last blog How Coaching Supports An Organization, we spoke about Read more »