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“We might replace the terms ‘misconduct’ and ‘capability’ with the more optimistic ‘willingness’ or ‘ability’.“ I recently wrote for Training Zone about the way employers conduct themselves around poor staff performances. A friend of mine found a new job in sales after a long time out of work. He was both relieved and excited to land the opportunity because he felt he had exactly the right mix of skills and experience to be successful.After a promising start, however, things began to take a turn for the worse. The company’s main product changed, making it much harder to sell and less relevant to

“If we coach our people properly we can hold them accountable for their performance and develop them at the same time.“ More and more organisations are ditching annual appraisals and formal performance reviews, but before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, let’s look at why coaching might be a better alternative. I wrote an article on this topic for Training Zone, check it out!

“As a manager of people, being a coach to the team is inevitable. They can do it well or they can do it badly. What they can’t do is avoid it.“ All managers are coaches – but not all managers know this and not all managers are good at it. How can we get managers to better embrace their coaching role? What do you think? I wrote an article on the subject for the guys over at Training Zone. Let me know what you think!

Looking at the list of key workers the UK Government published in response to Covid 19 is a humbling experience.

Lately I’ve seen a number of articles suggesting it’s time to abandon performance reviews, claiming they’re a tired relic of 20thcentury manual-work that has no relevance to today’s knowledge-work environments. There are certainly some obvious problems: how to ensure managers’ views of Excellent, Average,etc are the same; how to link the outcomes to pay without destroying motivation and how to stop staff and managers bending the system to suit themselves. (I worked with a company a couple of years back where someone told me that the staff pooled their Force Ranked bonuses and then redistributed them evenly amongst themselves!) It’s