Brainware Vault

Summary A combination of global pandemic and a new generation of employees are driving a realignment of the employee-employer dynamic. As people re-examine their work priorities, enlightened CEOs and senior leaders increasingly recognize that managers who understand and effectively influence human behavior deliver better results. Behavioral science is moving front and center as executives rethink […] The post Three Ways Behavioral Science Will Shape the Future of Leadership Development first appeared on Brainware Vault.

In his article, Employee Surveys Are Still One of the Best Ways to Measure Engagement, Scott Judd, the head of People Analytics at Facebook, observes that “…surveys are starting to look like diesel trucks, collecting dust in the age of electric cars.” Employee feedback surveys first emerged in the 1920s, along with scientific management and […] The post Brain Science is Turning Feedback Inside-Out first appeared on Brainware Vault.

The role of employee voice in organizations – whether in the form of work-related complaints, participating in decision making, contributing new ideas, or providing feedback – has been a topic of discussion and debate for over 200 years. The industrial revolution fueled the drive towards a greater employee voice via organized labor. The information era […] The post The Cost of Leader Silence first appeared on Brainware Vault.

I enjoy the privilege of mentoring a broad cross-section of people who are at different stages of their careers. One of the most notable trends in those conversations over the past ten years has been a shift away from focusing on a career path and corporate ladder climbing aspirations toward finding meaning and purpose at […] The post Meaningful Work – Purpose by Design first appeared on Brainware Vault.

Virtually every leader touts a deep belief in teams and teamwork and preaches the importance of it. The research that supports their enthusiasm is incontrovertible. Yet, most organizations do little to train their team leaders, especially first-level leaders, in how to develop and maintain high-performance teams. This high-say-low-do approach to team development results in an […] The post Predicting Team Performance: Stop Flying Blind first appeared on Brainware Vault.

It would be the unusual leader who would admit that they don’t aspire to build energized engaged teams that deliver exceptional performance. Yet, results too often fall short of aspirations. When I ask team leaders about the gap between their aspirations and reality, they give a variety of reasons for their team’s performance. A few […] The post Aristotle’s Mirror: Leadership Reality Undistorted first appeared on Brainware Vault.

Why we do what we do is one of the most interesting, and at times perplexing, questions for behavioral scientists, leaders, parents, and anyone else that deals with the mysteries of motivation. To start to understand motivation, we can visualize it as a continuum with motivations that are part of our nature (intrinsic motivators) on […] The post Solving the Mysteries of Motivation at Work first appeared on Brainware Vault.

How do you continuously improve your sales team’s performance? The traditional answer was to put in place a tough, heroic sales leader who embraced an aggressive sales culture, high-pressure pay-for-performance, intensive training, and constant culling of weak performers – practices that emerged after WWII and were refined in the 1980’s corporate world. In today’s sales […] The post Peer Coaching and Sales Team Performance first appeared on Brainware Vault.

Every organization (by default) has a purpose. Moreover, if you ask people in that organization about its purpose, they will have an answer. You don’t need much of a sense of humor to appreciate the irony of academics, management gurus, and consultants selling their services to the executives of companies to help them discover what […] The post Purpose – What Really Matters first appeared on Brainware Vault.

When Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” he was advocating that organizations could improve their performance through better metrics. I would argue that Drucker got it right, but that he should have added “and what you measure matters the most.” Many teams fail to measure the most critical predictors […] The post Are You Measuring what Really Matters? first appeared on Brainware Vault.

“The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback…” —Peter Drucker During my first experience as a team leader, I had a great manager who was way ahead of his time in his leadership development practices. In an era of annual reviews and forced rankings, he was a coach and mentor who set the […] The post Choosing the Dark Side – Why Leaders Avoid Feedback first appeared on Brainware Vault.

If you’ve ever played the game of golf you quickly realized that there are countless ways to hit the ball wrong, and far fewer ways to achieve a consistently good result. Coaching conversations are much the same. There are many ways to create conversations that produce results that range from awkward to disastrous, while finding […] The post Improve Your Coaching Conversation Game first appeared on Brainware Vault.

Team Relationship Management (TRM) is an approach to improving the effectiveness of an organization's teams and the wellbeing of the people on those teams. It uses feedback and data analysis about key relationships to understand and influence critical team processes and behaviors.

Feedback is the breakfast of champions. Top organizations don’t treat it as an activity to be added to already busy workdays – seeking feedback and proactively responding to it is a habit that forms an integral part of the culture, norms, and values of the best teams and organizations. The post Want Performance? Get Feedback. first appeared on Brainware Vault.

In his HBR article What to Do About Mediocrity on Your Team [icon name=”external-link” class=”” unprefixed_class=””], Joseph Grenny observed, “The toughest test of a manager is not how they deal with poor performance — it’s how they address mediocrity.” Over the course of many, many conversations with team leaders from around the world, I’ve found […] The post The Challenges of DIY Leadership Development first appeared on Brainware Vault.

In increasingly dynamic, complex business environments, helping people develop their strengths, build new competencies, and work collaboratively to deliver results has become a business imperative. In response, many organizations make significant investments in executive-level coaching. This coaching is typically provided by external groups focused on developing behaviors to improve senior-level teams and individual career prospects. […] The post Coaching Strategies to Improve Team Effectiveness first appeared on Brainware Vault.

In his HBR article, “To Reduce Burnout on Your Team, Give People a Sense of Control“, the author, Andrew Wittman, observes that team dynamics play a key role in workplace stress. He argues that “being part of a team can be a quick road to disappointment, frustration, and burnout, especially when some team members work harder […] The post Article Review: Reducing Team Burnout first appeared on Brainware Vault.

Complex global business environments, and the need for agility in both decision making and execution, are driving organizations towards ever greater collaboration and teamwork as the means of resolving challenges and creating competitive advantage. Most leaders agree that one key component in ensuring effective team functioning is the content and quality of communications to, and […] The post The Importance of Transformational Team Communications first appeared on Brainware Vault.

Many teams struggle with a fundamental conundrum: how do you get disciplined execution along with innovative, creative solutions? It often seems that any efforts to improve one-dimension causes losses on the other one. Disciplined execution stymies innovation; by its very nature, innovation and creativity are undisciplined. A challenge that I often encounter in older organizations […] The post Why Your Team Needs to be Agile first appeared on Brainware Vault.

Many factors influence performance and wellbeing at work, including professional and personal goals, job design and flexibility, skills and competencies, and perceptions of fairness and trust across key relationships. For many organizations and teams, the simultaneous pursuit of performance and wellbeing can feel like chasing conflicting goals. In his comprehensive review of recent Human Resource […] The post The Connection Between Team Performance and Wellbeing first appeared on Brainware Vault.