Developing Skills Quickly with the Science of Behavior

There is an old saying that has always bothered me: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. If it's just a proverb to point out how important community is, I get it…

Shifting from Evaluating to Coaching

How many times a day does this scenario happen in your organization? A Manager walks into the office and asks one of his direct reports, “Did you review progress against the quarterly goals in your…

Overestimating Your Leadership: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Many people underestimate the complexity of being a good leader while simultaneously overestimating their own leadership skills. According to Psychology Today, “The Dunning-Kruger effect is…

Leadership Success—A critical measure of effectiveness

In the book Measure of a Leader, the authors state, “The best predictors of leadership are found in the behaviors of the leader’s followers.” Measuring a leader by the success of the people he…

Increasing Meaningful Behaviors Part 2

Based on the positive response to my blog on Increasing Meaningful Behaviors, I thought it worthwhile to extend the discussion. As you now know, values can play an important role in our lives…

Increasing Meaningful Behaviors

For most of us in the US and for many throughout the world, our lives have been turned upside down by stay-at-home orders. We’ve lost access to many of our favorite places to spend our time.  …

Want to Build Discretionary Effort? Focus on Building Rapport

Think of discretionary effort as the more in the “I got more” GEICO commercials.  Discretionary Effort is defined as performance that is above and beyond the minimum requirements of a job. …

Bad Rules Are Getting in the Way of Your Good Leadership

Language is truly a double-edged sword.  Language allows us to cooperate, plan, coordinate, describe the future, talk about the past, and it even allows us to describe interactions between the…

Are You Developing Successful People?

We have all heard of the Peter Principle—“Observation that in an organizational hierarchy people tend to rise to "their level of incompetence." Thus, as people are promoted, they become progressively…

Earning the Right to Coach

When it comes to developing employees and improving performance, coaching and delivering feedback are critical actions for achieving desired results. In fact today, most organizations expect their…

Are You a Reinforcement Creator or Killer?

Most of us have had the opportunity to work under great, and unfortunately not so great, leaders. More than likely when you worked with great leaders you delivered high levels of discretionary effort…

The Poisoned Cue: How Management Practices Could Be Affecting Your Employees

In one of my recent blogs, Leaders Can Make or Break Engagement, I provided concrete steps leaders can take to move from managing to coaching.  This topic proves to be a very important one so it…

Leaders Can Make or Break Engagement: Moving from Managing to Coaching

In Gallup’s most recent State of American Workplace Report, they indicate that only one-third of the American workforce is actively engaged in the organization that employs them.  An even more…

Creating Alignment With Consequences

The science of behavior has much to teach us about how to improve performance and create a more engaged culture.  One of the key teachings from the science is that precise application of…

Sustainability in Your Process Improvement

Lean and Six Sigma are very useful tools for process improvement initiatives with the intent of reducing waste and variability in work processes and the product.  These reductions can lead to a…

I was going to give you feedback but…

How a leader provides feedback is one of those distinguishing factors between being a leader by title and being a truly effective leader.  The delivery of frequent feedback allows for continuous…

Love and Rock Climbing: A Shaping Story

Shaping is a powerful tool for teaching any new skill.  Although most shaping of our behavior is done inadvertently, people who use this process purposefully are better coaches and leaders who…