My heart sinks when I hear someone say, ‘John isn’t performing well these days. I must send him an e-mail’. Doesn’t everyone know by now that you can’t do sensitive and difficult conversations by e-mail!
In any conversation that has a strong emotional tone you must be face to face. These are the kind of conversations [...]

Are there people around you behaving like this?
 They perform way under their capabilities even though you hold regular performance reviews
 They use up most of their sick leave each year although you see no evidence of any serious illness
 They use mobile phones during meetings for mail and messages in defiance of agreements to [...]

There’s some really good news this week. I’ve had the proposal for my second Straight Talk book accepted for publication by my publisher, Random House Struik!
And there’s some really bad news! They want the manuscript by the end of January for July 2011 publication. So whatever other plans I had for the December holidays, they [...]

I’ve just written a piece for a journal on parenting called ‘Today’s Child’. It was written to the women who play Supermom: the ones who are there for everyone, who remember everything, who take care of the details and sort out the problems long after everyone else has collapsed in a heap.
Then I thought that [...]

One of the problems that almost all business managers wrestle with is that of holding people to account. When you don’t do it effectively you find yourself surrounded by people who are driving you crazy with their incompetent performance or inappropriate behaviours.
Conversations about poor performance often end with promises of improvement that come to nothing. [...]

The best time to hold a difficult conversation is now! The only reason to delay is so you have time to defuse your emotions and make a plan for what you will say. Then it’s time to talk.
When we don’t speak up, problems don’t go away. People continue to perform poorly and behave badly. Relationships [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been thinking about the week that was and the reactions of participants on my workshops to the Straight Talk process. I’ve been thinking about the patterns of behaviour that I commonly see, and how they affect the ability of people to hold effective conversations that get results and at the same time build better [...]