Infusing Coaching Skills into Managers

Coaching skills are critical for managing in today's ever changing landscape. Equipping managers with enhanced coaching skills is an important piece of building internal capacity, strength and resilence within organizations.

Dan Kennedy over at the Great Leadership blog wrote the following article on Infusing Coaching Skills into Managers. He proposes four solid tactics to start equipping your management team with enhanced coaching skills.

I appreciate Dan's comments, especially as I am working right now with a number of corporate clients on enhancing coaching skills and/or developing internal mentoring programs. Several months in to many of these medium term iniatives we are starting to really see tracking and a changing landscape of business relationships with is having an impact on the bottom line.

How are you building coaching skills with your management team?

Have a great week,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, PCC, CHRP
Potentials Realized
Phone: (416)996-TEAM (8326)

Team Building Critical for Smaller, More Virtual, Teams

There was a great article last week by Marcia Heroux Pounds entitled, "Go team! Need for collaboration greater when there are fewer employees". Click here to read the entire article.

Whether it's conflict resolution, getting to know one another better, or learning to leverage new roles, this fall's focus really seems to have moved to the team environment. I must admit that the requests we've been getting for team retreats, team coaching, and team assessments has increased quite significantly this fall. I hope that you will enjoy reading through the Team on Thursday column from the last year and a bit.

How have the recent economic and workplace events shifted your organization's value on team work?

What's the most burning issue facing your team - virtual, or intact - right now?

How would an investment into your teamwork transform business issues you are facing right now?

Questions about what support might benefit your teams right now? Please give me a call or drop me an email.

Have a great week,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized
Phone: (416) 996-TEAM (8326)
Email: info{at}potentialsrealized{dot}com

How to Develop a Leadership Development Strategy

Dan McCarthy, over at Great Leadership, wrote a fantastic post last month on How to Develop a Leadership Development Strategy. He goes through 7 key steps/stages which are essential in developing a leadership development strategy.

Regardless of economic situations, leadership development is still seen as a critical investment for many leading organizations. Staff and teams may be getting leaner, and in these times GREAT leadership is imperative.

I really enjoyed Dan's post given that I have been very involved in developing several leadership development strategies with partner organizations in the year. A number of them are now rolling out in pilot and secondary phase, and it is amazing to see how seeds planted are starting to sprout within these teams.

Dan's really got a handle on the importance of a holistic, structured approach, one that is grounded in competencies.

What do you see as essential ingredients for GREAT Leadership development?

Warmly
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, PCC, CHRP, CPT
Potentials Realized
Toll Free: 1-866-217-1960
Email: info{at}potentialsrealized.com

Team Productivty and Conflict

What happens to your team productivity when there is conflict?

There is a wonderful article recently published by the Vancouver Sun "Productivity affected by conflict management" which highlights research looking at the impact of conflict on team productivity.The article states,

"Researchers Kristen Behfar at the University of California, Randall Peterson at the London Business School, Elizabeth Mannix and William Trochim at Cornell University, say there are three types of teams that get bogged down in conflict and suffer as a result.

In their recent study in The Journal of Applied Psychology, they observed that rule-bound teams, equality-focused teams and unresolved teams paid dearly when conflict was not handled well. They noted that productivity declined as did team morale."

Conflict is inevitable for teams. What conflict is showing up in your teams? What is the impact of it? What approaches are supporting the team(s) to successfully navigate the conflict?

Have a great week,

Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, PCC, CHRP

Potentials Realized

How adept is your workforce to change?

A recent survey from Right Management found that"employees of nearly one-third of North American companies — 31 percent — adapt poorly to changes at work, hurting their productivity", as reported by Carrie Mason-Draffen of Newsday.com. The survey also found that only about 1 in 4 employees had the "agility to change". Read the whole article here.

How adept is your workforce to change?
What support are you providing to employees?
What vehicles are you using to support changes (training/coaching etc)?
What areas are you providing support in change management for?

A number of readers have emailed me regarding the silence here at the BizToolkit blog -- thanks for asking how things are going. It's been a very busy 2009 -- providing support to teams and inidividuals throughout the change process through team coaching, workshops and offsite retreats. It's also been a busy spring working on establishing and building a number of mentoring and leadership development programs with clients. On top of it, I am also working on the completion of a book which will be published in early 2010 by Pfeiffer Wiley.Needless to say, as much as I would like to be keeping up with regular posts...my creative juices have been somewhat overstretched. I do hope to be able to return to regular posts in the next few weeks when a number of these projects are onstream and/or completed.

With all the changes that are happening these days a huge competency for teams and professionals is around resilence. This is a topic that's been quite popular with clients. Consider the following questions:
What is your own professional resilience these days?
Which employees and teams are the most resilient in your organization?
What support do you need to shore up your resilence?
What action steps can you take to boost your resilence this quarter?

As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments...please feel free to comment below.

Warm regards,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, MES, PCC, CPT
Potentials Realized
Phone: (416) 996-TEAM (8326)

BizTip: Creating Boundaries

What are the boundaries you have established with your business? Many business owners only realize their boundaries once they have been encroached on.


The ability to be your own boss and have greater flexibility and self-direction are characteristics which often lead people into self-employment.



Take a few moments and ask yourself:

• What are your current boundaries for you and your business?
• How are you respecting these?
• How are your boundaries being encroached on?
• If boundaries are being encroached on, what's acceptable?
• What needs to change?

Some boundaries that you might want to consider are:

* The times of day that you work (i.e. you don't work before a certain time, or after a certain time)

* The times of day that you meet with clients

* The amount of money you are willing to invest in ....

* The amount of time you are willing to invest in .....

*The number of interruptions you are willing to have

* The amount of time you are willing to give things



After you have looked at these questions, select one that you want to focus taking some action on. What specific change will you commit to? Start developing a habit around this new area through ongoing action.



Jenn



Jennifer Britton, PCC, CPCC
BizSuccess Group Coaching

Virtual Team Leadership: Resource

As many of you know, Virtual Teams and Leadership are two ongoing themes for this blog, stemming out of my earlier work as a leader with virtual teams globally through my work in the international development sector. I continue to be amazed at how virtual team leadership skills, along with project management and global/cross-cultural management skills continue to be some of the most important skills for this decade, and unfortunately, skills that many organizations are really needing to improve.

There was a great article this month in CLO Magazine which addresses this increasingly important area of virtual team leadership:

Virtual Leadership for a Virtual Workforce by Jerry Fjermestad as featured in CLO Magainze, March 2009.

Jerry mentions that

"Leaders are responsible for the vision, planning, engaging the team, coaching, training, team learning, networking and promoting, among other skills".

He also mentions that

"The results are that virtual teams are at least as effective as face-to-face teams, and according to Powell, Piccoli and Ives, under some conditions, they are even more effective. Leader development leading to high-performance teams leads to successful organizations in this new virtual environment".

• How are you developing your leaders for the virtual realm? What's working? What's not?


• What are the challenges you are experiencing as you move forward with leadership development for these leaders?


• What else, beyond strong leadership, is needed to enable virtual teams to florish and really perform optimally?

Have a great week,

Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, PCC, CHRP

Potentials Realized

Email: info{at}potentialsrealized{dot}com

Ph: (416) 996-TEAM (8326)