The holiday season is in full swing! In addition to preparing for holiday activities, many of us are focusing on completing year-end tasks before taking time off from work. December can be a festive, high pressure, and emotional time of the year. For example, based on an emotional reaction, a client of mine recently responded…
It is easy to see why clients sometimes avoid telling the truth. There are often negative consequences for telling the truth—even if it is only to oneself. Telling the truth might make us look bad or put pressure on us to change our behavior. The truth can be scary. And let’s face it—sometimes a fabrication…
I have loved mosaic art since I was a child. I am fascinated by how the purposeful combination of little pieces of various shapes and shades can create a unique piece of beauty. For the first time since high school, I am enrolled in an art class: Mosaics in the Indirect Method. I spend Tuesday…
The Ken Blanchard Companies has hired a lot of coaches since we first opened up our Coaching Services division back in 2000. We currently have 153 coaches in place to work with managers and executives in organizations all over the globe. To assess whether the coach has the level of competence we need, we always…
Feeling disillusioned at work hardly sounds like something to celebrate. How could anyone feel good about low competence and low commitment? In fact, wouldn’t you want to hide it? In The Ken Blanchard Companies Situational Leadership® II training program, we teach that a Disillusioned Learner (D2) development level is part of the natural progression of…
I have been hearing the word grit a lot lately. It started when I purchased Angela Duckworth’s book GRIT (Scribner, 2016) in an airport bookstore this summer. In it, Angela writes “Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it.” She elaborates on the two…
Coaching has definitely become mainstream. It seems as if high potential people in senior positions, at the mid-level, and even on the front lines in organizations have access to performance coaches these days. But does that mean that all high performers are a good fit for coaching? In their book Coaching in Organizations, master certified…
Recently I was reading the white paper “Bringing Science to the Art of Coaching.” Authors Jack Zenger and Kathleen Stinnett look at a couple of key questions to explore while examining what research says about the effectiveness of coaching. Consistently, the data shows strong correlations between a leader’s coaching effectiveness and measures of employee commitment…
There is often confusion about not only what goes on during coaching sessions but also how to decide what changes to make or goals to work on when being coached. The lack of clarity in these areas can keep some people from making the commitment to work with a coach. So let’s get everything cleared…
Blanchard’s Situational Leadership® II model is based on the idea that an individual’s development is goal or task specific. It also teaches that there are four predictable phases a person goes through as they develop. In a nutshell when learning something new we often start out as an Enthusiastic Beginner. Then from there, if we…