High Performance Leadership

Do you manage performance problems? Coaching people to achieve their goals when they are experiencing performance difficulties takes skill, practice, and patience. What do we say? How do we encourage them? How can we be most helpful? It's important to identify the source of the problem. Find out if they truly lack the skill -- which is an indicator that training could help, or do they lack the willingness -- which is a completely different situation. Most leaders are happy to provide the training that their team members need in order to be able to perform at their best and achieve their goals. What training is available though to help someone who is unwilling to put the work in that it requires to succeed? My experience has been that there is no magic training for that kind of situation. Willingness is an inside job. Team members must be willing to learn, to grow, and to develop the ability to achieve their goals. A lack of skill requires patience and teaching. A lack of wi...

It's almost a curse word in the lexicon of leadership: micromanage. Haven't we all felt resentment at being overly managed? Haven't we all bristled at the manager who seems to want to control every aspect of our jobs, maybe even our very lives? And so as leaders we work hard to develop other approaches. We build skills that create participative, transforming leadership. We seek to motivate thru influence rather than power, because in the end, as John Maxwell said, "leadership is influence." But what if your job goes beyond leadership? What if the core of your job is to supervise? It's one of those things that makes front line supervision one of the toughest jobs in any organization. We are called to lead, to motivate, to inspire AND to achieve ever improving results. And, sometimes we must supervise a team member who simply does not get it. It's not because people are bad or have bad intentions. Most of the time, if someone is not meeting our expe...