I often find myself driving my car on auto-pilot. No, my car doesn’t actually have autopilot, or “driver assist,” but I’ll find myself mentally on autopilot. Since the vast majority of time when I drive I’m traveling the familiar journey to and from work, I’ll sometimes mindlessly start driving the same route even when I’m…
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…
Dear Madeleine, I have a business colleague—essentially a peer, although I am slightly senior to her—with whom I need to work collaboratively. We get along well on the surface but I am extremely frustrated with her work practices. We set timelines and deadlines for large segments of projects that we need to pass to each…
When you are constantly asked by a member of your work team for details on how to perform a task, it’s very easy to keep telling them again and again how to do it—or worse, doing it for them. But does this leadership style help them gain confidence and grow into a high performer? Or…
Some people carry an extraordinary share of the load at work. You know them—people who seem to be on everyone’s go-to list. Sometimes it’s an IT resource. Sometimes it’s a project manager. Sometimes it’s the person who has the clout or the drive to get things done. Often, 20 to 35 percent of value-added collaborations…
This guest post is by Michael Glazer. If only I had a dollar for every time I heard leaders say they want the people in their organizations to “tell me what I need to know, not what I want to hear.” Speaking truth to power is easier said than done, but people who can do…
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…
Dear Madeleine, I am a VP of sales for a global software organization. I love my job, which is good because I work constantly and have for the past 25 years. It has been rewarding and I have saved enough to be able to think now about maybe slowing down. I have been discussing retirement…
If you are tired of hearing the word millennial thrown around, you can join me in my quest to quell the town criers. I must admit, I even added to this dialogue in the keynote presentation I recently gave on the topic. I think a more accurate characterization of this generational group is what I…
When you look at all of the stats pointing to the low levels of employee engagement in the US and around the world, you might start to believe that people are naturally lazy and disengaged—or that people wouldn’t work if they didn’t have to. But that’s not true. In fact, that kind of misinterpretation 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…
Dear Madeleine, I am a fairly experienced manager, but I have reached my limit with one of my people—let’s call her Sam. She is extremely competent and up until about a year ago she was very reliable. Since then, it seems as if it has been one crisis after another. First, one of her kids…
