When we don’t solve performance problems as soon as they occur, it’s obvious that people will continue to perform badly. Patterns of behaviour and bad habits become established and conversations become more difficult.
If someone misses a deadline, you might say, ’Your report was due in yesterday but it’s not yet on my desk. What happened?’ [...]

How do you convince someone to improve their performance when they have been paid – and promoted – for years, for what you consider to be sub-standard performance?
One of the most difficult performance management problems is the one where you have taken over a team where people have not received honest feedback in the past. [...]

Being authentic is very scary. It must be, or we wouldn’t have so many ways of avoiding it.
Think how often you have posed as someone or something you are not; prevaricated to avoid telling the whole truth; procrastinated when you should have faced up to difficult conversations; pussyfooted around sensitive issues instead of dealing with [...]

Coaching and mentoring gets a lot of publicity, to the point that one could believe success is not possible without a personal coach or mentor.
The word ‘mentor’ comes from Greek mythology. In Homer’s Odyssey, Mentor was a friend of Odysseus. When Odysseus went off to the Trojan Wars, he left his son Telemachus in the [...]

When it comes to communicating about feelings, it is noticeable how most people operate in one or other of two modes.
Most of the time, they do not share their feelings. You never quite know what they are really thinking, or where you stand with them. You get hints in their non-verbal behaviour or in humorous [...]