Do you want to know how to deliver feedback effectively at work?
In this video, we will share with you five tips on how to deliver effective feedback that will be respectful and helpful to you and your employees.
Learning how to deliver feedback effectively is essential if you want to be a successful manager of people! We’ll show you how to deliver feedback to help your employees grow and learn. We’ll also discuss the importance of feedback in the workplace and give you some helpful tips on how to give feedback effectively!
Do you know how to make your performance chats easy every time?
All managers love it when they have to give great feedback; that’s easy, providing it’s purposeful that is! However, many managers struggle to hold people accountable during routine feedback or performance meetings. Managers ruminate ahead of giving feedback, catastrophising the team member’s reactions. So they sugarcoat the message, which has no impact and, guess what, leads to no uplift in performance or change in behaviour.
There is a way to make it easier: developing a psychological contract, or as we call it, the expectations chat. This chat aims to establish how the line manager and team members can get the best out of each other, which means giving feedback. So why not agree upfront on how you do that and get the two-way permission agreed upon while there are no issues in the relationship?
In this video, we share a simple four-step process that will make every performance chat easy and straightforward every time.
Do you know how to achieve your big and complex goals? How to make them easier to work on? If not, then this video is for you.
Firmly in leadership and management development, we highlight practical strategies and tips for making big and complex goals easier to achieve. Setting ambitious goals can be exciting, but it can also be overwhelming and intimidating, especially when you’re not sure where to start.
We share the umbrella goals technique used by client organisations worldwide to think, plan and communicate complex multi-part goals. Then, as with any big goal, we walk you through how to break your big goal into smaller, more manageable steps. Doing so can create a clear roadmap that will make the journey towards your ultimate goal less daunting.
By the end of this video, you’ll have another tool in your toolbox of practical strategies and tips to help you break down big and complex goals into smaller, more manageable steps. In addition, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge and confidence to tackle any goal easily and achieve your desired success.
With a burgeoning set of content on all things goals, tune into our Goals Playlist
Ever wondered how to change culture? It’s all about the choices we make in those moments of truth!
In this video, we unpack how one client used a social learning experience blended with gamification, group coaching and psychological safety to create a safe learning space. We brought together a multi-level audience to discuss how they would handle different situations. It was only when team members felt secure that they said what they really felt, exposing knowledge gaps, lack of confidence and doubts about what to do when under pressure.
Our favourite quote came from a junior team member who, in a multi-level audience of 40 people, asked “I know we all have said we’d do the right thing, but can someone tell me what that looks like?” The virtual room fell silent. This one example led to one of the most productive discussions we had.
By learning from your successes and failures, you can create a culture that is conducive to success. Learn how social learning can help you transform your organisation’s culture.
We work with organisations worldwide; in this video, we share how Lowell Financial Group used ‘What Would You Do?’, to embed the FCA Conduct Rules, helping 100% of participants feel confident to apply the rules in their job. What Would You Do? is the perfect learning solution for learning professionals looking to spice up their short-burst learning interventions.
We created What Would You Do? in response to a client looking for something different, engaging, high impact and can be run internally at a moment’s notice. We build a social learning experience that brings cross-functional groups together online or face-to-face to discuss everyday dilemmas faced in the workplace. When team members are uncertain or lack confidence, the last thing you need is them guessing or unintentionally placing your business and/or people at risk.
Are you a change agent or a manager responsible for helping people through workplace change – I imagine that means all of you!
We all respond differently to change; our attitudes and behaviours will depend on many factors. This video shares four labels to help you identify change behaviours and attitudes.
Check out this video, too; it will give you practical ways that will help you to help your people through change.
Leadership is a lonely place; when you lead for long enough, you are likely to make mistakes; this video shares five common mistakes that leaders make, often without realising their impact.
How good a leader are you?
Test your skills now with our personal leadership assessment and get the results instantly and directly in your inbox.
With a Growth Mindset, you learn from failure and why you fail to hit your goals with the FoooDo Model from Thinking Focus. This video shares four easy steps to turn failure into better results.
For more on FoooDo, our mental model and thinking tools for getting stuff done and achieving your goals, check out this video:
Use these questions to identify why you’re not getting the results you want or expect. Develop a growth mindset and turn failure into better results for you and your team.
Did you get creative and explore the art of the possible?
Ask yourself…
Did I create many ideas that I could choose from, possible things I could do, and ideas of the kind of things I might need.
Did I think about the things that might get in my way and how to overcome them?
Motivation is essential if you want to get the best from your team that is. How to get the best from your team comes from understanding what motivates them and how they like to work.
Do you know what motivates the members of your team?
Have you considered why your people are not stepping up?
This video is a 90-second summary of our first LinkedIn article, which asks why my people are not stepping up.
We explore how your leadership shadow can limit your people more than you ever imagined. The shadow of a leader makes it hard to step up; it feels too hard, so they don’t.
Stepping up is expected of every leader, and we hope our people follow suit, but your shadow and your behaviour get in the way.
As a leader, you cast a shadow. It may be unintentional, but it is inevitable. In your role as the ‘boss’, the ‘Grand Fromage’ (big cheese), the top banana, you create a range of perceptions for people that casts a shadow. A shadow is made up of a collection of helpful and unhelpful thoughts, it’s the lens through which your people attempt to interpret what you stand for and what you really want from them. Your shadow is how you are seen and become known – it’s your reputation.
A shadow is made up of a collection of helpful and unhelpful thoughts, it’s the lens through which your people attempt to interpret what you stand for and what you really want from them.
Leadership shadows can be fantastic, but they can also be destructive.
Let’s consider a leadership shadow that isn’t working. You, the person, may be reasonable (well, most of the time) and impatient—yes, but reasonable. You hired your people to do a job, but they are not stepping up for some reason. If your shadow creates doubt or uncertainty in your people, they will look for reassurance that they are doing a good job and getting it right.
Your tendency, though, is to step in and poke around to get the confidence and reassurance you need that they have it covered. So, when you lack confidence and need reassurance, you poke further, ask more searching questions, and start to dig deeper.
Do you see the problem? You both want confidence and reassurance.
But, if your leadership shadow causes uncertainty, you will unlikely get the confidence and reassurance you crave. When your people feel uncertain, they may pause and not want to expose a perceived weakness; you are their boss! As the boss, you decide people’s future. People don’t want to give their boss any cause for concern. And so, inertia reigns; they pause, fret, slow down, and, inevitably, are scared to fail.
When your people feel uncertain, they may pause; they may not want to expose a perceived weakness.
And so, the perpetual cycle begins as they wait for the leader to provide direction and guidance; as the boss, you feel the need to check and search for comfort. This feeling leads to resentment; as people start to question your trust and faith in them, you as the leader start to question whether your team are up to it; you’re not seeing them stepping up!
Photo by Ian Keefe on Unsplash
We call this the leadership vacuum; it emerges as a void between leaders and their reports. Learned helplessness leads to inertia and causes frustration. Leaders want their people to step up, and direct reports often want their leaders to set the directions and get out of their way.
The solution to this problem requires a change in behaviours from both.
As a leader, you need to create the headroom for your people to step up. That means being prepared to give before taking, and trusting your people. When you trust people and communicate that trust clearly and openly, you can begin the dialogue and establish the behaviours that fill the vacuum — creating safety where people can fail safely and not question themselves about their own self-worth in your eyes as their leader. To paraphrase Brene Brown, author of Dare to Lead, ‘let’s teach them to land before you ask them to jump’. This environment of trust enables learning and creates the space to test assumptions and expectations without concern.
When you trust people and communicate that trust clearly and openly, you can begin the dialogue and establish the behaviours that fill the vacuum.
In this podcast, Richard and Ricky explore what this means. What is different about the way in which senior people need to think, and what does that mean for them and the way that they work?
You can find out more about the four areas and how we use them below:
Your people need to step into the void and take a risk, enter the growth zone and trust you to have their backs. This leap, however, won’t happen until you put your trust in them. Until you communicate clearly about what you expect and work together to define how they might do it, and then crucially, get out of their way and let them get on with it.
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
Whichever role you’re in, it takes a leap of faith. It will take some coaching, regular discussion, and check-ins. You’re both looking for new behaviours that provide you with confidence and reassurance for it to become your new normal. It will take a little time to change your “go-to” behaviours of poking around to look for the certainty you need.
But, as with most things, if you want your people to step up – that journey begins with you!
Thinking Focus are behavioural change experts in the workplace. We believe that individuals, teams and business units underperform, not by choice, but because they can’t get out of their own way. We help individuals, teams, and business units challenge mindsets to unlock untapped and hidden potential and become more effective and productive.
