How can you manage an underperforming team as a new leader? Here are a few ideas to help design your approach to transforming your team into superstars.

The Rocket Model™ is a framework and set of tools for boosting team performance. It can be used to diagnose team dynamics, and to provide leaders with specific tools and activities to improve team performance.  It was created in response to questions and requests from actual managers worki

A guide to help you maintain boundaries while setting your successor up for success.

These six tactics create productive conflict with a focus on issues, not personalities.

A Tool from the Corentus Team Development Toolkit, The Thinking Path . A great tool to use in coaching, consulting, educating, parenting, etc. to better understand one's conscious and unconscious thought processes (their Thinking) and how it generates emotional/physical states (their Feelings) tha

New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter.

If you’d like trust to develop in your office, group or team — and who wouldn’t? — the key is sharing your weaknesses, says business writer Daniel Coyle.

Sharpen these five skills.

Five ways to build trust.

Beyond diversity...

Organizations are often run according to "the superchicken model," where the value is placed on star employees who outperform others. And yet, this isn't what drives the most high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan observes that it is social cohesion — built every coffee break, every time one team member asks another for help — that leads over time to great results. It's a radical rethink of what drives us to do our best work, and what it means to be a leader. Because as Heffernan points out: "Companies don't have ideas. Only people do."

One of the most straightforward paths to happiness at work is to fight against the scourge of time-consuming, unproductive meetings at every opportunity.

How not to support your remote employees right now.

Both resume reviews and interviews are well-known to be potential sources of bias and discrimination in the hiring process.

They’re some of the most expensive mistakes you can make.

Few organizations provide strong guidance or training for managers on meeting individually with their employees, but the author’s research shows that managers who don’t hold these meetings frequently enough or who manage them poorly risk leaving their team members disconnected, both functionally and emotionally. When the meetings are done well, they can make a team’s day-to-day activities more efficient and better, build trust and psychological safety, and improve employees’ experience, motivation, and engagement at work. The author has found that although there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to one-on-ones, they are most successful when the meeting is dominated by topics of importance to the direct report rather than issues that are top of mind for the manager. Managers should focus on making sure the meetings take place, creating space for genuine conversation, asking good questions, offering support, and helping team members get what they need to thrive in both their short-term performance and their long-term growth.

The latest wave of Covid-19 is pushing us to new depths of personal resilience.

Companies are figuring out how to balance what appears to be a lasting shift toward remote work with the value of the physical workplace.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Sam Harris, author and host of the Making Sense podcast, for a wide-ranging conversation. Given the moment we’re currently living through, we natural…

We humans aren’t very good at assessing true leadership qualities and gravitate towards arrogant confidence in those in charge. Unfortunately, that is often a sign of weakness and the fallout can be tough on teams.

One-on-one meetings with direct reports are high leverage opportunites to impact your team's performance. Make sure you're getting the most out of them.

​While most business leaders now believe having a diverse and inclusive culture is critical to performance, they don't always know how to achieve that goal. Here are eight powerful truths that can help turn aspirations into reality.

Listen, I support diversity, but I gotta get this sales position filled asap — it’s killing me to have this territory uncovered.” — Sales Hiring Manager

We're hiring quite a lot of new people at GDS, and that's brilliant because there are so many new brains and new skills and new faces to get to know. It's also difficult. It's difficult for those newcomers to know …

We’ve all been there— you spend an exorbitant number of hours on a proposal or presentation for work— revising, reworking, crossing every T and dotting every I. You walk into the meeting, maybe you’ve listened to your favorite song to pump you up (Lizzo? Queen?), completed your requisite power pose

There are three billion working people on this planet, and only 40 percent of them report being happy at work. Michael C. Bush shares his insights into what makes workers unhappy -- and how companies can benefit their bottom lines by fostering satisfaction.

Have you ever been promoted for excelling at something, only to find your performance suddenly faltering? This was the case for Sana after her promotion to a role as a senior manager responsible for managers rather than directly overseeing a team. There are substantive differences in how you manage individual contributors and how you manage … Continued

Good one-on-one meetings between managers and their direct reports address the practical and personal needs of the employee, benefitting their performance, growth, and well-being, as well as the success of their team and the broader organization. However, since managers are typically the ones who run these meetings, the employee’s needs are often forgotten. Then it’s up to the employee to ask questions to get the attention they need. The authors’ research points to twenty-eight questions that can drive the best conversations.

In recent years leading executives—from firms like Google, Bridgewater, and Netflix—have touted the advantages of a work environment marked by candid feedback. Employees seem to have bought into the benefits too. In a 2019 survey, 94% said that corrective feedback improved their performance when it was presented well. Unfortunately, the increased diversity of our workplaces has made it much more likely that feedback won’t go over well and will be misinterpreted as an act of hostility. That’s because people from different cultures, genders, and generations have varying expectations for how feedback is delivered and by whom. What’s standard in America, for instance, can come off as harsh or baffling in other countries. Boomers and Millennials hold radically different ideas about what’s appropriate too. And gender differences add to the complexity. Women who are frank are often seen as aggressive, and men have a bad tendency to offer unwelcome advice. This article explains how to navigate the divides: Understand the norms of feedback recipients and adjust for them. Follow the three A’s—make sure any advice is intended to assist, actionable, and asked for. Last, get everyone on your team on the same page by establishing a common approach and building regular feedback loops into your collaborations.