Traditional performance management is set up to rank and rate employees and to “correct” their weaknesses. This approach often fails to actually improve performance. So how can managers know the right balance between praise and criticism for employees? A serious review of an individual’s strengths and weaknesses is essential to exceptional career development.To inspire exceptional performance, managers have to lead with meaningful feedback based on what each person naturally does best. Employees in today’s workforce expect their managers to coach them—primarily based on their strengths.

Strengths-Based Conversations

Organizations and teams with strengths-based cultures consistently outperform their competitors, but knowing everyone’s strengths is not enough to create change.It takes ongoing conversations, reflection and practice to successfully integrate strengths into your organization’s daily routines.(1) Start with the CEO or it doesn’t work.(2) Require every employee to discover their strengths.(3) Build an internal network of strengths coaches.(4) Integrate strengths into performance management.(5) Transform your learning programs to maximize the time each person uses to improve competencies.

 Five Steps to Building a Strengths-Based Culture

Every company experiences good turnover and bad turnover.What does a successful exit look like?(1) The employee feels heard.(2) The employee leaves feeling proud of their contribution.(3) You create a brand ambassador.The experiences and interactions people have during their employee life cycle in your organization will determine your retention of star employees and ultimately your employment brand. All this depends on how well your managers coach each person you hire.

The Exit

Pay and promotion discussions need to be consistent with the development and real career progress.While pay is a personal matter, criteria for pay increases and promotions should be transparent. Don’t use forced rankings to determine pay or promotion for small groups, assuming each team has high, middle and low performers. Generally, most employees want some form of incentive pay and they want autonomy and influence over their pay. When your employees have high well-being, they perform better, so make financial well-being an organizational responsibility

The Money And The Position

About half of great managing is rooted in hardwired tendencies, and the other half comes from experiences and ongoing development. Great managers inspire teams to get exceptional work done, set goals and align resources for the team to excel, influence others to act by pushing through adversity and resistance, build committed teams with deep bonds, and take an analytical approach to strategy and decision-making.

The Five Traits of Great Managers

Managing isn’t a great experience for most people. Work is worth more for them than for the people they manage. Managers report more stress and burnout, worse work-life balance, and worse physical well-being than the individual contributors on the teams they lead. Gallup recommends development programs consistent with building a strengths-based culture, shifting from being a boss to being more like a coach, and requiring executives to have strengths-based conversations once a week with each manager or team leader.

How to Develop Your Managers

Employees in the new workforce aren’t looking for amenities such as game rooms, free food and fancy latte machines. They are looking for benefits and perks that will improve their well-being, meaning those that offer them greater flexibility, autonomy and the ability to lead a better life. U.S. employees are the most likely to change jobs for health insurance, which is an expense that, for most, is increasing and cutting into their discretionary income. More than half would change jobs for bonuses, a retirement plan, paid vacation or flextime.

Benefits, Perks and Flextime

Creativity in organizations is essential. Many organizations say they want their employees to be highly creative. Yet most employees don’t believe that they’re expected to be creative or think of new ways to do things, even though every job has the potential for creativity. No one is closer to the job than the individuals doing it. Even when employees strongly agree that they’re expected to be creative, only half of them are given time each day to do so or believe they can take the risks required to be creative.

How to Manage—and Nurture—Creativity

The old boss-to-employee, command-and-control leadership environment has “worked” when it comes to building process-efficiency systems, engineering large building and creating infrastructure. But the top-down leadership techniques of the past have not adapted to a workplace that now demands coaching and collaboration to thrive.

Organizational Change Is Hard

70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager. When you have great managers who can maximize the potential of every team member, you have delivered on the new global will which is a great job and a great life.Inspirational messages are important but they’ll have no significant impact unless leaders build a strategy to bring multiple teams together and make great decisions.

What Makes A Difference In An Organization

There are five general innate traits/tendencies that predict performance across job types. They are motivation (drive for achievement), work style (efficiently organizing work), initiation (taking action), collaboration (building partnerships), and thought process (solving problems through assimilation of new information).Four criteria for successful hiring.(1) Prior experiences and achievements,(2) Innate tendencies,(3) Multiple interviews, and(4) On-the-job observation.

Hiring Analytics: The Solution

Diversity categories include race, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, disability, lifestyle, personality characteristics, height, weight, other physical characteristics, family composition, educational background, tenure with the organization, political ideology, and worldview which essentially constitutes the full spectrum of human differences. How does a leader address them all? The solution lies in how your employees feel about three requirements. “Treat me with respect,” “Value me for my strengths,” “Leaders will do what is right.”

Diversity And Inclusion

Today’s employees demand autonomy and flexibility right down to where they work and how their workspace is designed and arranged. Slightly more than half of American workers say they would change jobs for one that offered them more flexibility. More than one-third would change jobs for one that allowed them to work where they want at least part of the time. The three office features employees want are privacy when they need it, personal workspace, and having their own office.

The New Office

Organizations globally need a much higher proportion of women in the workplace, not just because it benefits women, but because it’s good for business. Gender-balanced work groups have a greater capability to get work done and meet customers’ needs. On average, women are more engaged than men, and female managers tend to have more engaged employees than male managers. The top challenges facing women who work at paid jobs fall under these three areas: unfair treatment, pay inequity, and work-life flexibility.

The Gender Gap

Two-thirds of U.S. employees have been either not engaged or actively disengaged in their jobs and workplaces during this time. A high-development workplace requires much more than just administering surveys. Measurement on its own doesn’t inspire change or boost performance or improve the workplace or business outcomes.A culture of high employee development is the most productive environment for your employees. High-development cultures are CEO and board initiated, educate managers on new ways of managing, practice companywide communication and hold managers accountable.

Creating a Culture of High Development

Almost universally, men and women mention “balance between work and family” as one of the top challenges that working women in their countries face. Whether an organization offers flexibility and whether it actually honours flexibility are two different things. Some organizations have an explicit policy about flexibility, yet they implicitly pressure employees to be in the office or make them feel guilty for leaving work to take care of family matters during the day. Each individual employee—women as well as men—defines what a good life and career mean for them.

Women in the Workplace: Work-Life Flexibility

Millennials and Generation Z want a purpose, not just a paycheck. They are no longer pursuing job satisfaction—they are pursuing development. They don’t want bosses—they want coaches. They don’t want annual reviews—they want ongoing conversation. They don’t want a manager who fixates on their weaknesses. They want a job that is no longer a job—they want a life.

Not Just A Job

Culture begins with your purpose, meaning why you are in business. It lives or dies day to day through your managers. Culture determines your brand which is how employees and customers view your company. A world-class culture inspires your most talented employees to create superior customer experiences. When an organization makes a brand promise but fails to deliver, it loses credibility with customers and especially employees.An organization’s performance improves when its employees understand what differentiates its brand.

Organizational Culture

Beyond luck, which some right decisions are attributed to, there are three keys to success:<ul><li>Leaders know their limits, meaning their strengths and weaknesses.</li><li>They apply critical thinking and identify high-risk blind sides.</li><li>They use analytics-driven evidence.</li></ul>

Make Great Decisions

The No. 1 reason people change jobs today is “career growth opportunities.” Experts recommend offering ambitious and productive employees these new paths for advancement beyond becoming a manager: (1) individual achievement as a manager or high-performing contributor, (2) personalized development toward a career path and (3) flexible career paths with different options for different stages of life.

Make “My Development” The Reason Employees Stay

Transform your managers into coaches by teaching them to meet these three requirements:(1) Establish expectations.(2) Continually coach.(3) Create accountability.Employees whose managers involved them in setting goals were nearly four times more likely to be engaged than other employees. Employees who receive daily feedback from their manager are three times more likely to be engaged than those who receive feedback once a year or less.Performance measurement needs to be paired with individualized development to keep it connected to business goals in the employee’s mind.

The Three Requirements To Make Managers Into Coaches

A must read for leaders, CEOs and Founders.

Packed with 52 discoveries from Gallup’s largest study on the future of work, It’s the Manager shows leaders how to adapt their organizations to rapid change, ranging from new workplace demands to managing remote employees, a diverse workforce, the rise of artificial intelligence, gig workers, and attracting – and keeping – today’s best employees. Who is the most important person in your organization to lead your teams through these changes? Gallup research reveals: It’s your managers. While the world’s workplace has been going through extraordinary historical change, the practice of management has been stuck in time for more than 30 years. The new workforce – especially younger generations – wants their work to have deep mission and purpose, and they don’t want old-style command-and-control bosses. They want coaches who inspire them, communicate with them frequently, and develop their strengths. Packed with 52 discoveries from Gallup’s largest study on the future of work, It’s the Manager shows leaders how to adapt their organizations to rapid change, ranging from new workplace demands to the challenges of managing remote employees, a diverse workforce, the rise of artificial intelligence, gig workers, and attracting – and keeping – today’s best employees. Who is the most important person in your organization to lead your teams through these changes? Decades of global Gallup research reveal: It’s your managers. They are the ones who make or break your organization’s success. When you build great managers -- ones who can maximize the potential of every team member -- you will see organic revenue and profit growth, and you will deliver to a every one of your employees what they most want today: a great job and a great life. This is the future of work. It’s the Manager includes exclusive content from Gallup Access -- Gallup’s new workplace platform, chock full of additional content, tools, and solutions for business. Your book comes with a code for the CliftonStrengths assessment, which will reveal users’ Top 5 strengths.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Who will lead your workforce during rapid change? Gallup research reveals: It’s the manager. While the world’s workplace has been going through historic change, the practice of management has been stuck in time for decades. The new workforce — especially younger generations — wants their work to have deep mission and purpose. They don’t want old-style command-and-control bosses. They want coaches who inspire them, communicate with them frequently and develop their strengths. Who is the most important person in your organization to lead your teams through these changes? Decades of global Gallup research reveal: It’s your managers. They are the ones who make or break your organization’s success. Packed with 52 discoveries from Gallup’s largest study of the future of work, It’s the Manager shows leaders and managers how to adapt their organizations to rapid change — from new workplace demands to the challenges of managing remote employees, the rise of artificial intelligence, gig workers, and attracting and keeping today’s best employees. Great managers maximize the potential of every team member and drive your organization’s growth. And they give every one of your employees what they want most: a great job and a great life. This is the future of work. It’s the Manager includes a unique code to take the CliftonStrengths assessment, which reveals your top five strengths, as well as supplemental content available on Gallup’s online workplace platform.

Jim Clifton

Jim Harter

It's the Manager

This is the Thursday before Easter Day. Christians remember when Jesus shared the Passover meal with his disciples, breaking bread and drinking wine.
Many Christians remember this event by sharing bread and wine in a service called Holy Communion, Eucharist or Mass. It is a reminder that Jesus sacrificed his life for mankind.

The Last Supper

Good Friday is the Friday before Easter Sunday when Christians remember Jesus' crucifixion. During Good Friday services, they reflect on the meaning of the crucifixion and the central message of Christianity.This message is that through his death on the cross, Jesus atoned for the sin of mankind which came into the world when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, and through Jesus' sacrifice mankind is reconciled with God.

Good Friday

Easter Sunday marks Jesus' resurrection.
<ul>
<li>After Jesus was crucified, his body was placed in a cave, guarded by Roman soldiers and an enormous stone was put over the entrance.</li>
<li>On Sunday, Mary Magdalene followed by some of Jesus' disciples visited the tomb to find that the stone had been moved and Jesus' body had gone.</li>
<li>Christians call this the Resurrection and they believe that God raised Jesus from the dead as a sign that He accepted Jesus' sacrifice for the redemption of sin and that mankind is forgiven and will have eternal life in Heaven.</li>
</ul>

Easter Sunday

This is the Sunday before Easter Sunday. It is the first day of Holy Week and celebrates Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem riding on a colt, often referred to as a donkey.Crowds of people greeted him, throwing palm branches on the road.

Palm Sunday

When did Christians start celebrating Easter? How is it celebrated around the world? Where do Easter eggs and bunnies come from? Here's everything you need to know about the most important Christian holiday

history

History

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

food

Food

religionandspirituality

Religion & Spirituality

The Easter Celebration

During the Holy Week, Christians remember the last week of Jesus's life

Learn and revise about the different ways Christians celebrate festivals with BBC Bitesize GCSE Religious Studies.

Easter Celebrations: The Holy Week

Ramadan comes at a different time every year because it is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, a date-keeping system based on lunar cycles, unlike the Gregorian calendar (the one used by most of the world, including the U.S.), which is based on the solar year. A new month begins with the appearance of the new moon, or the crescent moon, and ends with the next appearance of a new moon.
The month of Ramadan thus moves backwards about 10 days every year relative to the Gregorian calendar.

Different Days Of Celebration Each Year

The month-long holiday is observed principally in Muslim-majority countries in Africa and Asia but also by the believers around the world, including the roughly 3.3 million Muslims living in the U.S. During Ramadan, from sunrise to sunset, observant Muslims (with some exceptions, mostly health related) are forbidden to eat or drink (or smoke, or engage in sexual activity) to purify their thoughts and increase their devotion to God.

How Ramadan Is Celebrated

Different communities follow different protocols for determining when a new month begins. Some communities follow a set lunar calendar, others use scientific observations to make an official decree about the arrival of a new moon, and still, others mark a new month only after the actual sighting of the crescent moon in their community.
Though the exact dates of Ramadan are never uniform around the world, they come pretty close.

The Days Of Celebrations Vary Even Within The Community

Observed by millions of Muslims worldwide, Ramadan is an interesting mix of austerity and celebration. Read on to find out why it’s so important to the Islamic faith

communication

Communication

travel

Travel

Ramadan: Islam's holiest month

The Muslim holy month will last from early June to early July of 2016

Why Ramadan Starts on a Different Day Every Year

Individuals and organizations need to constantly gather new sources of information in order to expand their knowledge and grow, creating a need to incorporate multiple personas. These personas are driven by the idea that no matter how successful a company currently is, no one can afford to be complacent. The world is changing at an accelerated pace, and today's great idea maybe tomorrow's anachronism. The learning roles help keep your team from becoming too internally focused, and remind the organization not to be so smug about what you “know”.

Ten Faces Of Innovation: The Premise

The Experimenter celebrates the process, not the tool, testing and retesting potential scenarios to make ideas tangible. 
A calculated risk-taker, this person models everything from products to services to proposals in order to efficiently reach a solution. To share the fun of discovery, the Experimenter invites others to collaborate, while making sure that the entire process is saving time and money.

The Experimenter

The Storyteller captures our imagination with compelling narratives of initiative, hard work, and innovation. This person goes beyond oral tradition to work in whatever medium best fits their skills and message: video, narrative, animation, even comic strips. 
By rooting their stories in authenticity, the Storyteller can spark emotion and action, transmit values and objectives, foster collaboration, create heroes, and lead people and organizations into the future.

The Storyteller

The Caregiver is the foundation of human-powered innovation. Through empathy, they work to understand each individual customer and create a relationship. 
Whether a nurse in a hospital, a salesperson in a retail shop, or a teller at an international financial institution, the Caregiver guides the client through the process to provide them with a comfortable, human-centered experience.

The Caregiver

The Experience Architect is that person relentlessly focused on creating remarkable individual experiences. This person facilitates positive encounters with your organization through products, services, digital interactions, spaces, or events. 
Whether an architect or a sushi chef, the Experience Architect maps out how to turn something ordinary into something distinctive—even delightful—every chance they get.

The Experience Architect

The Cross-Pollinator draws associations and connections between seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts to break new ground. 
Armed with a wide set of interests, an avid curiosity, and an aptitude for learning and teaching, the Cross-Pollinator brings in big ideas from the outside world to enliven their organization. People in this role can often be identified by their open mindedness, diligent note-taking, tendency to think in metaphors, and ability to reap inspiration from constraints.

The Cross-Pollinator

Successful businesses build fresh innovation strategies into the fabric of their operations. They do it year-round and in widely differing parts of their enterprises. When the team’s creative engine is running at top speed, the momentum and synergy can keep a company ahead through bad times and good.

The Hurdler is a tireless problem-solver who gets a charge out of tackling something that's never been done before. When confronted with a challenge, the Hurdler gracefully sidesteps the obstacle while maintaining a quiet, positive determination. 
This optimism and perseverance can help big ideas upend the status quo as well as turn setbacks into an organization's greatest successes—despite doomsday forecasting by shortsighted experts.

The Hurdler

This is the person who ventures into the field to observe how people interact with products, services, and experiences in order to come up with new innovations. 
This person is good at reframing a problem in a new way, humanizing the scientific method to apply it to daily life. Anthropologists share such distinguishing characteristics as the wisdom to observe with a truly open mind; empathy; intuition; the ability to "see" things that have gone unnoticed; a tendency to keep running lists of innovative concepts worth emulating and problems that need solving.

The Anthropologist

The Collaborator is the rare person who truly values the team over the individual. In the interest of getting things done, the Collaborator coaxes people out of their work silos to form multidisciplinary teams.
In doing so, the person in this role dissolves traditional boundaries within organizations and creates opportunities for team members to assume new roles. More of a coach than a boss, the Collaborator instils their team with the confidence and skills needed to complete the shared journey.

The Collaborator

The Director has an acute understanding of the bigger picture, with a firm grasp on the pulse of their organization. Subsequently, the Director is talented at setting the stage, targeting opportunities, bringing out the best in their players, and getting things done. 
Through empowerment and inspiration, the person in this role motivates those around them to take centre stage and embrace the unexpected.

The Director

The Set Designer looks at every day as a chance to liven up their workspace. They promote energetic, inspired cultures by creating work environments that celebrate the individual and stimulate creativity. 
To keep up with shifting needs and foster continuous innovation, the Set Designer makes adjustments to a physical space to balance private and collaborative work opportunities. In doing so, this person makes space itself one of an organization's most versatile and powerful tools.

The Set Designer

The practice of innovating is too valuable a skill to overlook. Businesses that downplay the importance of pushing the boundaries and asking the questions run the risk of becoming stagnant, inflexible, and irrelevant. What the author argues in The Ten Faces of Innovation is that “innovation” is more than a buzzword found on the covers of business magazines; it’s a lifestyle and your company’s best secret weapon.

The author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation reveals the strategies IDEO, the world-famous design firm, uses to foster innovative thinking throughout an organization and overcome the naysayers who stifle creativity. The role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation. Over the years, IDEO has developed ten roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers. Among these approaches are the Anthropologist—the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation. Filled with engaging stories of how Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Safeway and the Mayo Clinic have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, The Ten Faces of Innovation is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal.

creativity

Creativity

product

Product & Design

The author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation reveals the strategies IDEO, the world-famous design firm, uses to foster innovative thinking throughout an organization and overcome the naysayers who stifle creativity. The role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation. Over the years, IDEO has developed ten roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers. Among these approaches are the Anthropologist—the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation. Filled with engaging stories of how Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Safeway and the Mayo Clinic have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, The Ten Faces of Innovation is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal.

Jonathan Littman is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Jonathan Littman has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Jonathan Littman's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Jonathan Littman

Thomas Kelley runs the marketing side of the hugely successful industrial product design firm IDEO. His brother, David, started the company in 1977 in Palo Alto, CA. One of his earliest projects was designing the first mouse for Steve Jobs at Apple Computers.

Tom Kelley

The Ten Faces of Innovation

Examine at least three exchanges between you and another person, using these three indexes. Are you engaged? Is the other person engaged? On what dimensions: emotional, social, task?
<ul>
<li>First, do not begin messages with anything negative. Why? This creates a general gloomy tone and negativity in the other person such that everything that follows will be interpreted as negative. So begin with the positive.</li>
<li>Second, aim for at least a two-to-one ratio in your positive–negative messaging.</li>
</ul>

The Task

People behave differently when they are not face-to-face. They are more negative and, often, more presumptuous, conveying the impression that they are entitled and not easy to work with. This is a problem because excessive pride or hubris harms our ability to locate the sweet spot in any kind of negotiation. If we are unwittingly conveying negative impressions in non-face-to-face interactions, we need a wake-up call!
Excessive pride may blind us to finding sweet spots. People quickly develop impressions of our personalities on the basis of very limited information.

Putting Pride Aside

According to researchers, three types of engagement can be measured via your words: emotional engagement, social engagement, and task engagement. 
Let’s face it: relationship building is more difficult over email than face-to-face. One key to building a relationship via e-communication is to be engaged.

The Types Of Engagement

As a second step in analyzing your own email communication, count all your pronouns—e.g., “I,” “me,” “you,” “us,” “our,” “we,” etc. Personal pronouns reflect attention to people rather than to objects or concepts.
The more personal pronouns are present, the more people are paying attention to people—themselves as well as others. First-person pronouns are interesting.

You And I

Using a lot of “I, me, mine” words can reflect a neurotic or ruminative self-focus, in natural conversation it often takes the form of hedging (e.g., “I think this might work”). But it also can reflect dominance.
According to researchers, the ideal rank order of personal-pronoun use in negotiation is first: “you,” second: “we,” third: “I,” and fourth: “they.” Your total number of pronouns is a reflection of your social engagement. Also, circle all the verbs (action words) in your email (“work,” “talk,” “meet,” “align,” etc.). These reflect task engagement.

I, Me, Myself

Think about your e-communication like cholesterol, meaning that there are two kinds of conversational tones: positive and negative.
<ul>
<li>Positive-toned communication: phrases such as “This is great,” “I really like . . . ‚” and “Thank you,” through greetings (“Dear so-and-so”) and closings (“Best wishes”), and also in emojis such as smiley faces etc.</li>
<li>Negative-toned communication: negations and other phrases like “I don’t think . . .” and “This is a problem” and the even harsher “I am not happy with . . ..”</li>
</ul>
It is the ratio of positive to negative that is really important for our e-communication.

Conversational Tones

A few practical tips and tricks to help you go get what you deserve.

teamwork

Teamwork

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

Ask for a Raise

This excerpt from Negotiating the Sweet Spot: The Art of Leaving Nothing on the Table offers three tips for writing emails that engage and persuade.

It's the Manager

Easter Celebrations: The Holy Week

Why Ramadan Starts on a Different Day Every Year

It's time to Read like a Pro.

The Ten Faces of Innovation

It's time to
Read like a Pro.