What The Heck Is Executive Coaching

“What the heck is executive coaching?” I get asked that question many times a day.

I admit that coaching is a nebulous term. When I say that I’m a certified coach, people ask if I coach sports teams. When I say that I actually coach work teams, people look surprised. ‘Why would a work team need coaching?’ they ask. Because work teams are just like sports teams:

• They are made up of different people who try to reach a team goal together.
• Each person on the team has two types of goals in mind: individual goals and team goals.
• Every team member has his/her own communication style, which may or may not work well with the others on the team.
• Although there is one official leader (the coach or captain), there are usually other team members who carry as much weight, if not more weight, than the official leader.

Similar to a sports team, thriving work teams need an ‘outsider’ to coach them to success, whether the whole team or just some of the team leaders. That’s what CHCI does. We coach teams and leaders to get from Point A to Point B, in the most effective way possible.

During the years, many people have asked for a practical book on coaching, so they can bring coaching skills to their own teams. That’s how Anne Loehr’s book, “A Manager’s Guide to Coaching” was created. Here is an excellent write up about one of the book topics: How to create effective coaching questions. Enjoy!

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

How to Train Your Staff With A Decreasing Budget

In our last blog, How to Use the 70/20/10 Model to Develop Careers, we discussed the “what”, “when” and “how” of using the 70/20/10 Adult Learning Model for employee development. Now let’s discuss the “why”.

Managers face daily decisions to ensure their team gets what’s needed for success. But with budgets getting smaller, it’s hard to stretch resources. After reading this blog, you will learn several tips on how to stretch your training budget, spend wisely, plan strategically and still meet your employee development goals.

The “Why” to Employee Development

What is the return on investment (ROI) for a manager who wants to allocate time and financial resources for her employees? Simply put: a better prepared employee is a more productive employee. According to the Association of Talent Development (ATD), companies that invest in training employees see a 218% higher income per employee than companies that don’t. The 70/20/10 model for employee development is one effective tool to leverage the current talents of your staff and build stronger teams, which increases the organizational bottom line.

We know that the manager cannot motivate an employee to improve; that has come from within the employee. However, managers can create a learning environment for them to grow. How? The first step is to take an inventory of the current staff, using a consistent assessment tool such as a 360-degree assessment, with an objective lens to collect skills data. This full assessment will provide two sets of data in one assessment: strengths and areas to grow. By selecting the right 360 tool, you can complete two tasks at once for the same price, creating cost savings for your budget. This 360 view lets managers begin to leverage the strengths in their staff that can be shared with other employees; it also shows the delta between the strengths and weaknesses, so you can create the best strategy to decrease the weaknesses of the entire team.

Why Are Employees Leaving Your Organization?

In our daily lives, we use personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings to make our decisions. And that’s perfectly fine. They serve us well in many ways.

However, when it comes to improving work performances, personal biases, intuitions, and gut feelings just don’t cut it.

Data can improve your own, your team’s, and your organization’s performance; people analytics can help. People analytics is the data that identifies workforce patterns and trends. Here are some questions that can be answered with people analytics:

• How engaged are our employees?
• What skills does my organization need to invest in, to achieve our mission?
• Why are my employees leaving the organization?

These questions and many more are the kinds of questions that people analytics can answer. Even if you don’t regularly use data in your job, you can still learn a lot with people analytics, regardless of your supervisory level.

A brief primer on people analytics

Before we answer why employees are leaving your organization, let’s start by defining a few terms:

Data are facts, statistics, or other items of information. Data are all around us; you just have to know how to look for it, compile it, and make sense of it. We can use data to understand problems and processes at a micro-level (between individuals), at a mezzo-level (team-level), or at a macro level (organizational level).

So who uses data?

One group of people who use data are data analysts. Data analysts organize, examine, analyze and use data to draw meaning. They tend to focus on understanding previous events to describe things that have already happened.

How to Break the Glass Ceiling

Panelists at the IREM Global Summit share best practices for mitigating bias and advancing diversity.

Cultivating talent is the industry-wide mission for the property management profession and all of the commercial real estate. At the Institute of Real Estate Management’s Global Summit last week in San Francisco, an international panel of rising leaders shared best practices and strategies for advancing that goal through diversity.

Signs of progress for women in real estate stand side by side with persistent contradictions. Women entrepreneurs enjoy a rising profile; nearly one-third of all privately held firms are owned by women. On the educational front, women bring more to the table; they hold more undergraduate degrees than men and earn 50 percent more graduate degrees than their male counterparts. Women’s workplace priorities are led by flexibility and quality of life, according to national studies; compensation ranks third.

The speakers also recounted the qualities that women in business tend to bring to the table. “The more diversity, the better your product is going to be, the better your bottom line is going to be,” noted Anne Loehr, executive vice president at the Center for Human Capital Innovation and the panel’s moderator.

Eight Ways to Improve People Processes in Your Organization

People are a critical part of every organization’s balance sheet. Investments related to acquiring, retaining, developing, and inspiring employees are critical to your organization’s success, requiring a thoughtful strategy to build and maintain a productive workforce.

CHCI’s talent life cycle, called PRIDALRM, refers to the interrelated strategies that support the most important assets of an organization – the people. Most of the activities that occur within an organization’s human resources, human capital, and talent management divisions can be distilled to one of the eight components highlighted in the PRIDALRM image. 

CHCI uses PRIDALRM to diagnose problem areas and develop targeted remediation efforts. This systematic approach to organizational performance encourages the interconnection among elements and alignment to outcomes. Let’s review the eight components.

Starting with the “north star” of the talent life cycle, the workforce PLAN sets up a framework that allows organizations to address current needs and identify future opportunities and threats. It helps answer the following questions:

• Does the organization’s workforce have the right capabilities today?
• What resources will the organization need to be successful in five years?
• How can our human capital approach give us a competitive advantage in our industry?

The next component, RECRUIT, is about talent acquisition. Talent acquisition is the organizational process which fills current and future positions and manages the transition of new employees to becoming fully productive. According to research commissioned by Glassdoor, 95% of companies admit to hiring the wrong people every year.  In fact, Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) identified that the cost of a bad hire could be up to five times the amount of a bad hire’s annual salary; so hiring the wrong person is a costly mistake. Here are three categories of questions to ask candidates at the initial hiring process to help determine if candidates are a good fit in your organization: