Professional articles Recommended by the School Director
Coachability
Developing the potential of employees costs time and money and requires a lot of energy and mental capacity of the manager. In such a situation, it helps significantly if the employee in question is coachable. Being coachable means that one is ready to do what it takes to change, improve and excel. The person is receptive to feedback, accepts constructive criticism and uses it to improve their work performance. As you can imagine, an uncoachable individual is quite the opposite. They avoid feedback, make excuses, blame others, and generally have a bad attitude about their performance being evaluated. Read on to learn the common traits of coachable employees so you can create a realistic plan for developing your subordinates (and yourself).
Shared Responsibility: We All Either Drown Or Swim Together
This post was inspired by an approach called The OZ Principle. This is a parable that the authors themselves drew from the fairy tale book The Wizard of Oz, the lesson of which is that everyone must accept responsibility for everything that happens in their life, and that obstacles on the way are better handled with others, by working together in a team, where everyone contributes their unique qualities for the benefit of all. The authors of The OZ Principle have helped senior management around the world in a variety of industries to promote greater employee involvement and accountability and to continuously improve organizational cultures that support accountability.
People Need To See Meaning In Their Work
Imagine that you have decided to participate in research by the University of Pennsylvania (USA) focused on the relationship between a person's life and work. Together with the other 195 respondents, the researchers presented you with a questionnaire that contains three paragraphs on the first page (edited, shortened). Read them carefully and decide to what extent each label describes your attitude to work. The questionnaire will tell you what motivates you at work, and the following text will encourage you to think about the reasons why your colleagues go to work. This can come in handy when you're trying to motivate your co-workers.
Avoid Mistakes With Checklists
We have all blamed ourselves at some point in our lives for forgetting to do some small, but essential action in a sequence of partial steps. All too often it was something completely simple, supposed to be routine, something we'd done hundreds of times before. This time we just missed it for some reason, and now it's back. Atul Gawande offers a simple solution for these situations – a checklist. Well, at least it seems like a simple solution, but in his book The Checklist Manifesto, he gives many examples of why something as trivial as a check list is so difficult to put into practice. However, if you want to consistently avoid mistakes and feel less overwhelmed in complex situations, then this is the approach you need.
Improve Yourself as a Reader and Leader
American President Harry Truman is credited with saying: "Not all readers become leaders, but all leaders must be readers." In English, the phrase "Read to Lead" has a noticeably more sonorous sound, but the message is clear. And it doesn't have to be exclusively about leadership books. It's more about how reading itself cultivates you. Reading in general can help you understand people better, deepen your decision-making skills, improve your communication with others and be more creative, all of which are essential characteristics of a modern leader.
