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How to Resolve Performance Problems At Three Levels If you are not talking about the right problem when you carry out a performance appraisal discussion, no amount of talking will solve the problem! Performance problems can be complex and it is important to know how to get down to the real issue. How to Make the Most of Positive Feedback in Performance Appraisal Animal trainers use it. The research supports it. You know it is the right thing to do. If you really want top performance from your people, give them the one thing most likely to help them deliver. Give them positive feedback. When You Do Performance Appraisals, Listen More Than You Talk Managers often do most of the talking in performance appraisal discussions. They say employees gain by sharing in their experience and views. They say they know what the problems are and from their experience they also know the solutions. That may well be, but when you are talking there is little motivation for your employees to think for themselves or to be committed to action. Do you Hold People Accountable for Performance? Many people think that holding employees to account means talking tough, using an authoritarian management style, and telling everyone what to do. In fact, a really tough manager asks for ideas from employees and then holds them to account for their actions. It might look softer, but in reality it is much tougher. How Well Do You Do Performance Appraisal Interviews? Performance appraisal processes are often detailed, elegant and efficient. Today, they are often computerized. But development and motivation of people takes more than clean paperwork and clever software. The quality of the conversations between manager and employee is what counts. Still Struggling With Performance Appraisal? Get The Facts Right Reviewing employee performance should be fairly straight forward. But as every manager knows, that is not the case. Performance appraisal goes off the rails when the facts of the matter are not handled correctly. How To Be More Resilient: Learn To Influence Others When you are unable to influence people and events around you, you feel helpless, disempowered and frustrated. Resilient people have good influencing skills. They build good relationships and help themselves and others achieve better results, no matter how difficult the circumstances. This article shows you how to influence others to change their behaviour. How To Be More Resilient: Manage Upwards Managing your boss can be difficult and high risk. Knowing how to do it takes away the feelings of frustration and disempowerment that many people suffer at work. Use the guidelines in this article to increase your influence up the line, and to do it safely. How to Be More Resilient: Obtain And Use Feedback You need a balance of positive and negative feedback to improve your performance, but obtaining it can be difficult and scary.Use the guidelines in this article to obtain useful feedback and to make the most of it in improving your performance. How To Be More Resilient: Reframe So You See Things Differently You become more resilient when you learn how to reframe. Reframing helps you shift your perspective of events from negative to positive. It does not change the event, but it does help you hold a more positive attitude. As a result, you have more energy, better ideas and a good chance of working yourself out of the difficulty. How to be More Resilient: Focus and Take Action When times are tough, the tough, and the resilient, keep going. No matter how hard it is to keep your bounce, holding onto a positive mind set and maintaining your energy levels are the only way to get yourself through difficult times. Staying focused and taking action to get results are imperative. How To Build Up Resilience: Focus On What Works Do you spend more time thinking about what has gone wrong and how you will never get it right, than you do about your successes and capabilities? Use the five techniques in this article to get rid of negative thinking and build up your self confidence, energy and resilience. How To Build Up Resilience: Change Your State Events can sometimes get the better of you and you get into a negative state. This article contains five tools for putting yourself back into a positive state so you can bounce back with energy and resourcefulness. How to Build up Resilience: Choose Your Attitude Attitude and behaviour influence each other, and both are choices. You can choose how you behave and you can choose the attitudes you hold. This article illustrates how important it is that you are aware of your choices and that you make good ones. How To Be More Resilient: Challenge Negative Thinking Resilient people choose to hold positive assumptions about themselves and others. Their positive assumptions help them to think more clearly and creatively, and react more positively to challenges. This article shows you three ways you can challenge your negative assumptions. How to Be More Resilient:Identify Priorities In tough times it can be hard to decide where best to expend your personal energy and resources to get the results you want. Resources are always limited. It is critical that you identify where there will be most pay-off before you start out, and then put your energy to achieving results in those areas. Four Steps That Will Keep You On Track To Achieve Your Goals You cannot achieve your personal goals and objectives if you do not make them a priority in your life, and then focus your efforts and energies on them. Learning these four steps for saying No will make sure you are not distracted from what is important. How to Use Feedback to Become a Top Performer The top 20% of people survive. Becoming one of them must be your objective in difficult economic times. Learn how to use feedback to improve your performance and become a survivor. Key Steps In Becoming Resilient And Learning How To Keep Your Bounce Resilient people keep going even when the going is tough. They stay focused and energised. They get results. They know that resilience is not character or personality. It is a set of behaviours that we can choose to learn and apply. What Do Your Conversations Say About The Culture Of Your Organisation? One can learn a great deal about the culture of an organisation by listening to the conversations that people hold. What kind of conversations do you hear in your workplace and what do they tell you about your culture? Being Stressed Is A Choice. Learn How To Say No The pace of life gets faster and faster. There is more and more we have to do: there is more and more we want to do. How much more of this can we take? It is important to remember that being stressed is a choice, even when you are up to your neck in crocodiles. 10 Tips For Running Better Meetings Most of us feel we spend far too much time in meetings. Much of that time is often wasted. It is not difficult to run efficient and productive meetings if you follow the tips in this article. Develop Healthier Relationships by Learning How To Say No How often have you found yourself saying Yes, when all you really want to do is say No! If you cannot say No, you are unable to protect your own integrity and will forever be at the beck and call of others. This article shows you how to say No in three simple steps. Conversations That Can Change Your Life We have many conversations in the course of a lifetime. Some are routine; inconsequential. Others determine the course of relationships and sometimes, even history. How able are you to recognise and step up to the critical conversations in your life? Walking the Talk: How to Live Up to Your Values We talk a lot about values such as showing respect, developing people and caring for customers. Unless we learn to walk the talk with day to day behaviours that support these values, the hopes we have of living up to them will be nothing more than empty intentions. A Step By Step Model For Speaking Up To An Abusive Manager Many people put up with disrespectful and abusive behaviour from their managers because they do not know how to speak up without making things worse. At the same time, many managers are unaware that their people find their behaviour disrespectful and abusive because no-one has ever been brave enough to give them feedback. Here is a step by step guide on how to do it. Make Difficult Conversations Less Difficult By Stepping Off the Moral High Ground When you go into a conversation assuming that you have all the information, that you are in the right and that you also have the answer to the problem, it is unlikely that you will obtain any commitment to your proposed solution. You need to step off the moral high ground and think through how you might be part of the problem. The Four Most Common Mistakes We Make in Difficult Conversations Some of the problems we face in difficult conversations are caused, not by the subject matter, but by the way we behave in these conversations. Improve your communication skills by avoiding four of the most common mistakes. Develop Better Working Relationships by Speaking Up When People Stress You Speaking up when people irritate or offend you keeps your stress level down and working conditions peaceful. Here is how you can do it without damaging working relationships. Improve Your Communication Skills:Use Facts To Make Difficult Conversations Safe It can be difficult to separate facts from opinions and feelings when a conversation is emotionally charged. Putting the facts on the table at the start of a conversation provides a safe and non-accusing point from which the conversation can proceed. This article shows how a manager uses facts to hold an employee accountable for his behaviour. Improve Your Communication Skills: Communicate To Understand, Not To Win There is always more than one side to a story. Conviction that you are right leads to argument and gets in the way of your hearing alternative views. It also prevents your developing open, respectful relationships. Keys to Handling Your Emotions Effectively in Difficult Conversations Conversations on topics where we hold strong but opposing views are difficult because of their emotional content. Learning to express your emotions constructively in conversations like these leads to better communication and better relationships. Handle Really Difficult Conversations: How to Talk Safely About Attitudes And Relationships Conversations about performance can be difficult, but when you need to speak up about attitudes or relationships you need to plan very carefully before you say anything. You may find that the problem has been caused by your own behaviour. Three Ways to Make Communication Safe So People Will Talk To You When you think you have the facts, that you know who is to blame and you know why, you make it very difficult for others to speak up. As a result, you may never get to the bottom of problems. Here are three ways to make conversations safe so you find out what is going on. Improve Your Relationships By Learning How to Communicate Through Safe Conversations Relationships consist of conversations. They grow, and they unravel, conversation by conversation. When a conversation is safe, you can say anything; so can the other person. In safe conversations you can get to the bottom of problems and come to agreement on solutions easily. These are the conversation on which good relationships are built. How To Speak Up To an Abusive and Intimidating Colleague If you work with toxic people you have a choice between putting up with their behaviour or speaking up to try to improve the situation. You need to know how to make the communication safe if you are not to make things worse. Here is a step by step guide on how to do it. How To Speak Up On Sensitive, Personal Issues Without Damaging Relationships Instead of avoiding difficult conversations, you can learn how to make them safe. Eventually you will find that you can talk to almost anyone about almost anything. You get results and you develop better relationships. Four Tactics You Can Use to Make a Difficult Conversation Safe Conversations about the way we communicate with each other are personal, sensitive and difficult. Setting the tone at the outset is important if the conversation is to proceed safely. Try these four ways to make conversations safe so you can resolve communication problems. In Performance Appraisal, it is the Quality of the Conversation that Counts Many organisations have detailed processes and documentation for managers to use when they carry out appraisal interviews. Often it is computerized. It looks elegant and efficient. But development of people takes more than paperwork and software. It is the quality of the conversations between manager and employee that makes all the difference. Better Listening Leads to Better Performance Reviews When managers hold performance reviews, they tend to talk more than they listen. They say employees gain by sharing in their experience and views. But listening to what employees have to say contributes to their personal development as well as virtually guaranteeing commitment to better solutions. Get Commitment, not Submission, when you Manage Performance Problems Managers sometimes act as if talking straight with people means telling them what to do and then watching them closely to make sure they do it. This management style may get the work done, but there is not likely to be much commitment to it. How to Confront an Employee who has a History of Poor Performance What do you do when you take over a team and find that your predecessor has not managed the performance of people effectively in the past? When performance problems have been allowed to continue, perhaps for years, without being confronted, you face a very difficult performance management situation. Three Mistakes To Avoid When You have Performance Improvement Conversations Conversations about performance are some of the most important conversations managers have with their people. Unfortunately, these conversations are often handled very poorly. Learn how to avoid three of the most common mistakes. Four Steps for Handling Poor Performance Effectively When people do not perform to the standard expected of them, managers often hold back in tackling the problem. They ignore it, hoping it will go away. Then they drop hints about the need to improve. Finally, in desperation, they impose disciplinary action. There is a better way. Learn how to hold performance reviews effectively and resolve performance problems using these four steps. How to Confront Poor Performance Effectively Managers often avoid confronting poor performance, preferring to side step difficult conversations and possible confrontations. But performance problems do not go away when they are ignored and hints or sarcasm only damage the relationship between employees and their managers. Use these steps to confront poor performance.