20 articles on leadership, communication, assessment and the craft of learning.
Practice · 08 Nov 2019Ten books for L&D and HR practitioners, each with a line on what it changes in your practice, and an honest note on what I left off the shelf.
Leadership · 02 Oct 2019Generation labels explain almost nothing about how a person wants to be managed. The differences that matter are career pace, feedback and meaning.
Leadership · 20 Aug 2019Leadership offsites produce insight reliably and behaviour rarely. What has to be in the design before the room, and what to stop buying instead of it.
Communication · 16 Jul 2019A presentation is a test of thinking before it is a test of speaking: message, structure, evidence and delivery, and which one usually fails.
Learning design · 04 Jun 2019A training calendar lists dates. A learning journey uses the gaps between sessions for practice, manager check-ins and re-assessment at day sixty.
Practice · 21 May 2019Emotional intelligence is a small set of learnable skills, not a personality type. What the term covers, what practice can change, and what it cannot.
Competency · 30 Apr 2019Mapping fails when it produces a document rather than a decision: what a framework is for, how to build one managers use, and where most die.
Communication · 12 Mar 2019Most communication programmes are bought as a topic and rated well. These twelve design elements decide whether anything is different six weeks later.
Leadership · 14 Feb 2019The move from doing the work to getting it done through others is a role change, not a promotion. What to hand over now, and habits for the first 90 days.
Practice · 22 Jan 2019Identify, invest, institutionalise. A capability plan survives a change of leadership only when tied to promotion, budget and appraisal, not a sponsor.
Coaching · 06 Nov 2018Coaching and mentoring are used interchangeably, then judged by the wrong standard. What each is for, when to pair them, and the swaps that cause damage.
Communication · 11 Oct 2018Useful, uncluttered, unambiguous, urgent. Four tests for business writing, with before and after examples showing what changes when the ask comes first.
Practice · 18 Sep 2018Soft skills, behavioural training and competency development name different objects. The label you pick decides what can be observed, bought and assessed.
Communication · 09 Jul 2018Attention is spent by the listener, sentence by sentence, not given to the speaker. Structure, brevity and a single ask do more than any amount of polish.
Talent · 01 May 2018Engagement is decided in ordinary weeks by managers, not in the annual survey by HR. What to fix first, and the four numbers that show whether it worked.
Communication · 17 Apr 2018Listening is four moves, not a personality trait: attention, summarising, testing the inference, holding silence. Each can be drilled in an ordinary week.
Leadership · 17 Apr 2018Preparation, opening, behaviour, commitment. A structure for the conversation you have postponed, short enough to use this week and precise enough to hold.
Leadership · 17 Apr 2018Most teams do not leave because they dislike a manager. They leave because they cannot predict one, and three ordinary habits do most of the damage.
Talent · 13 Apr 2018The line is repeated so often it has stopped being examined. What managers do that pushes people out, and the fixes available short of replacing them.
Sales · 13 Apr 2018Most sales training teaches technique far from the deal. The version that changes numbers is built on live pipelines, manager coaching and call review.
