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Guiding Principles For Successful Managers
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Guiding Principles For Successful Managers

As coaches and managers, we spend a lot of time and energy making sure our employees are okay. We worry about how to give feedback in a way that will build them up and give them confidence to grow. We worry about how to talk and listen effectively. We stay up at night strategizing how to set goals that will challenge but not overwhelm them, and we spend our days being patient as employees navigate their way toward those goals.
What we don’t spend nearly enough time on is checking to make sure WE’RE okay. As anyone who’s ever travelled on a plane knows, you have to put your own oxygen mask on first. It’s pretty hard to help your seatmate if you’ve just passed out from lack of oxygen, and the same goes for helping your team. If you exhaust your energy trying to solve every little problem for your coachees, you might find you have no energy left to be a good coach or manager. So how can you make sure your oxygen mask is secure?

We’ve heard a lot of stories from the trenches of coaching over the years, and they tend to boil down to the same sorts of issues. We’ve collected a few of pieces of advice for dealing with them. Here are five:

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5 Ways to Take the Sting Out of Culture Change

Change isn’t easy. But it is inevitable. With the recent and rapid changes taking place in talent and performance management, many HR leaders are finding themselves in the uncomfortable role of change-maker. Here are five tactics for making that evolution go a little easier on you and your organization.

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The Difference Between Feedback and Reinforcement

We talk a lot about positive and negative feedback, and also about positive and negative reinforcement. Reinforcement and feedback are both useful tools in a manager’s skill set. But are they the same thing?

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The Evolution of Learning: 5 Things Coaches Need to Know

A hundred years ago the word “education” may have conjured up images of chalk and slate in school-houses, or strict nuns rapping students on their knuckles.  It was a different world.

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How Good Employee Coaches Use Tech as a Utility Player

On a baseball team, a utility player adds value by playing well in a multitude of different positions. Team managers routinely call utility players into a whole variety of situations, because they can count on them to always help.

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Reconstructing Performance Management for Both the Employee and the Company

Co-authored by Zachary Chertok, Research Analyst, Aberdeen Group &
Ted Power, Chief Customer Officer, iCoachFirst 

In 2017, Aberdeen found that 64% of Best-in-Class companies (the top 20% of performers as defined by Aberdeen’s Best-in-Class research methodology) distrusted traditional performance reviews. 

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How to Prep Your Culture for Unexpected Change

Planned change is a challenge for any organization. As leaders, we have to work hard to plan and to bring every employee along. But no matter how daunting planned change is—at least we have time to create an action plan, and a shot at controlling the message.

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In Case You Missed It: Best Performance Management Articles this July

We can’t believe we’re already halfway through summer! If you’re like us, you still have so much to do and so little time to do it. One of the items on our to-do list is to stay in-the-know about all things performance management. Here are five articles we found to be the most eye-opening during July:

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In Case You Missed It: Best Performance Management Articles in June

If you’ve been too busy getting ahead of business before summer sets in to keep track of the latest happenings in HR and talent management, don’t worry; we’ve got you covered with this month’s top industry new items. Here’s our June round-up of the articles we found to be most insightful:

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Making Connected Learning & Assessments Work

Think back to when you were in college, or even high school. Maybe there was a certain class you weren't crazy about. It wasn't in your major and you couldn't fathom any of the information being useful once you tossed your graduation cap skyward. If you had a test coming up, you waited until the night before to start cramming all the textbook knowledge you could into your brain. Then you went into class the next day, (ideally) aced the test—and by the end of the next week forgot everything you'd just "learned."

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