Employee Feedback : Business Learning Coach Blog

Framing Accountability into Employee One-on-Ones

By Jim Grinnell, Ph.D. Alex had an epiphany as he reviewed his one-on-one notes from the past four meetings. In each of the sessions, Alex noted Don’s inability to consistently meet his weekly metrics. As he reflected on these notes, Alex realized that this pattern extended across the entire two years that they worked alongside [...]

Conducting Effective Employee One-on-Ones

By Jim Grinnell, Ph.D. If you’re not doing weekly employee one-on-ones, you’re squandering an immense opportunity. Think about the things employees want from their jobs. They want to feel like their efforts are contributing to something meaningful. They want a clear set of goals to shoot for and a sense of how they are progressing [...]

Giving Effective Event-Based Feedback

By Jim Grinnell, Ph.D. Event-based feedback involves the on-going feedback that you give to direct reports for specific, discrete activities. Another way of thinking about event-based feedback is that it is “real-time” feedback that guides the future activities of your direct reports. It’s important to distinguish between event-based feedback and the more comprehensive feedback provided [...]

Sometimes a Manager Needs to Give a Good KITA

By Jim Grinnell, Ph.D. For those who are unfamiliar with the acronym KITA, it stands for kick in the ass. When applied to management, KITA often implies an abrasive and demeaning approaching to driving employees toward task/goal accomplishment. As we have morphed into an “everyone is a winner” society, KITA has been painted with a [...]

The ABCs of Employee Coaching

By Jim Grinnell, Ph.D. In a previous article (Who to Coach… The Star, the Steady, or the Struggling?) I presented a broad approach for allocating one’s employee coaching efforts across varying employee competency levels. This article extends that discussion, providing more concrete guidance relative to coaching your “stars” (A players), your “steadies” (B players), and [...]

Fear Not the Employee Coaching Process

By Jim Grinnell, Ph.D. In the inaugural post on this blog (Steps to the Coaching Process) I discussed some of the benefits of employee coaching. Overall, coaching raises self confidence, develops new skills and abilities, and it enables employees to become self-learners and problem solvers. Taken together, these benefits result in huge performance improvements. (As [...]

Setting Stretch Goals… and Avoiding SNAP Goals

By Jim Grinnell, Ph.D. Take a quick gander at some popular leadership books and you’ll come across exhortations to set sky-high goals and then step back and watch your direct reports move heaven and earth to attain them. There has been ample research at both the individual and organizational levels demonstrating the positive correlation between [...]

Keeping Your B Players B Players

By Jim Grinnell, Ph.D. If you’re like most managers, your team is comprised of a bunch of B players, a smattering of A players and unfortunately a few C players. In a previous article, I argued that your coaching efforts should be skewed toward your A players because the benefits derived from marginal performance improvements [...]

Teach First… Leadership Will Follow

By Jim Grinnell, Ph.D. “Teaching is the highest form of understanding.” –Aristotle During the past twenty years there has been considerable discussion about the need to create learning organizations. In large part this interest was spawned by the publication of Peter Senge’s seminal book The Fifth Discipline in 1990. Senge aptly extols the virtue of [...]

Who to Coach… The Star, the Steady, or the Struggling?

By Jim Grinnell, Ph.D. We’ve all heard the bromides about the importance of coaching employees. Unfortunately, when we drill down to the level of practice, coaching runs headlong into a myriad of obstacles. This article focuses on just one objection, that being the “I want to coach, I really do, but I just have too [...]

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