Management, Coaching, Consulting, Project services

An important part of my role is working with people in day-to-day interactions, but also to help them grow on the long term. It's always motivating to see how people can change and evolve in the right direction when the right feedback is provided - when the dialogue is open, when the sender is open and honest in the comments and observations, and when the receiver is also interested in what others have to say. It's not that when somebody tells you did something wrong, that you have to immediately agree with them - I'm the first to be against. Still, when two or more people tell you that you are drunk, you definitely go to bed. I've had one guy who was always gloomy, never satisfied by anything, and always expressing his concerns and reasons to be upset with loud voice. After two years of working together, although he did not become the most positive person, he learned how to listen to others, how to contain his anger, and how to express his ideas in a way that fa...

Every now and then, depending on the company, a manager has to evaluate the people in the team. If you are a project manager, you might have it when the project is over, or when you release some of the people from the project. If you are a people manager, and have directs in your responsibility for the whole year, formal performance management will probably happen once or twice in the year. Either way, the performance evaluation process is the most official and an important step in providing formal feedback to your employees. It is a good opportunity to formalize the feedback that you provided along the year, to recognize progress or to take corrective actions. But how do you deliver an effective performance review? First of all, and the most important step, well known by all of us, is that the performance review should not be a surprise to the employee. As a manager, you have to provide feedback about the way the employee executes on the job during the whole year. Use every opp...

More and more often I hear that one can only earn respect and power only if one can use the NO word as needed. NO is the most fearest word - it is said to close doors, to shut down opportunities, to bring sadness into one's heart, to make both parties suffer from the consequences of a NO. BUT... it's also a differentiator, in a world where people are more and more discussing about leadership and how to manage expectations, and how to achieve more with less. NO means making the right choices, in the right moment. I find it really difficult to use, and I've found one great resource to give me power to use it. I've learned that the NO can also be POSITIVE, and it's really surprising when you hear about this at first. How can a NO be positive??? Yet, if you say it correctly, if your NO is for the specific situation, and not to a whole relation, if you deny only the possibility of that opportunity, but you stay true to your ideals, to what you value most, and k...

It's beginning of the year, and for a lot of companies it is the time for looking back to what happened last year and evaluate the performance of the resources. You all know how to do performance evaluation , so I won't lecture on this, instead, I'm asking you: what are your criteria for evaluating a resource? Do you look only at their performance, do you take into account the context , too, the environmental conditions and all the factors that may impact a person's performance? Or you just look at the evaluations that you did over the year, sum it up, and that's it? And if you answered yes to the above questions: by taking into account the reviews you collected over the year about a person, without keeping in mind the big picture of the context and needs and demands we had on that person, do we build an accurate image of that person's performance? These are questions that I need to answer pretty fast, as I need to give feedback to all my team members, and ...