Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? Each of these one-word questions can push organizational leaders and their team members toward the clarity they need to achieve success. In this post I’d like to focus on who and what. When leaders set clear expectations, outcomes are much more likely to hit the mark. And it’s just…
Ken Blanchard found out early in his career that setting clear work goals, although seemingly common sense, wasn’t common practice in the organizations he worked with following the publication of his best-selling book with Spencer Johnson, The One Minute Manager®. In conducting classes with organizations eager to develop their own one minute managers (and, more…
As a leader, have you ever felt as if you were rowing upstream alone while your team watched from the bank, wondering what you were doing? Have you ever felt as if you were the only one carrying a sense of urgency to get something done? I’ve experienced this as a leader and I’ve also…
New survey data just published in the July/August issue of Training magazine shows a serious gap between employee desires and reality when it comes to goal setting, goal review, and performance feedback from their managers. More than 700 of the magazine’s subscribers were asked what they wanted out of their individual meetings with their managers…
In a new column for Fast Company, Scott and Ken Blanchard recommend taking a mid-year look at how you and your company are doing against yearly goals. The purpose is to identify what’s working and what might be in need of a mid-course correction. For goals where momentum has stalled, the two authors recommend reconnecting…
I’ve just returned from the 5th International Conference on Self-Determination Theory. The remarkable and often mind-blowing research on motivation that was shared and debated by 500 scholars from more than 38 countries will be impacting our world over the coming years. But there are also little tidbits you can put into application immediately. For example, even…
For many, the word redirection translates to, “Uh oh—big trouble.” For some, the idea of a redirection can seem the equivalent of a dismissal, separation, or firing. That’s a limiting perception. The job of managing people includes managing roles, goals, and day-to-day performance. Redirection is a part of that process. In some ways it’s like…
You can learn a lot about what people want in a leader by asking them! Over the years, I’ve had a chance to hear hundreds of people respond to the question, “Who was your best boss, and what was it about him or her that made them so special?” The answers, though wide-ranging, (and very…
Over 30 years ago I watched a TV news documentary about the animals we eat–how we treat cows, pigs, chickens, fish. By the time the 15-minute broadcast was completed I knew I would never eat meat again. And indeed, to this day, I have not eaten any meat or fish–or foods flavored with them. I…
In their latest post for Fast Company online, management experts Scott and Ken Blanchard share that, “One of the big mistakes we see among otherwise promising managers is the self-limiting belief that they have to choose between results and people, or between their own goals and the goals of others. We often hear these people say,…