Featured Article...
THE BUSINESS CASE FOR COACHING
Written by Wendy Capland, CEO, Vision Quest Consulting
The higher up the organizational ladder an executive climbs, the less he/she can depend on technical skills, and the more he/she must have
command of effective interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence.
Organizations spend large sums of money to hire coaches for top executives in an effort to improve
these abilities. Are coaching programs effective in improving bottom line performance for organizations?
Research by the Center for Creative Leadership has found that the primary causes of
derailment in executives involve deficits in emotional competence. The three primary ones are:
- Difficulty in handling change
- Not being able to work well in a team
- Poor interpersonal relations
A study of 130 executives found that how well people handled their own emotions determined how much people around them preferred to deal with them (Walter V. Clarke Associates, 1997). If you can’t manage change well yourself, don’t work well in a team environment, and have inadequate “people skills,” how will you be able to function well as a leader? Good leaders need to have all of these skills, and the better they are at it, generally the further they go in the organization...
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Featured Products/Updates...
Announcing The
Launch Of TruTrack® Interactive Development Planning
TruTrack® is
an interactive development planning tool that is seamlessly integrated with
TBC's .NET survey hosting platform,
TruScore®. TruTrack®
allows survey participants to create a stored online development plan and email it to a manager, coach, or other
stakeholder. Reminders can also be
scheduled in the participant's business calendar (i.e. Microsoft
Outlook) to prompt goal
completion. LEARN MORE »
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Book Review...
THE TRUTH ABOUT MIDDLE MANAGERS: WHO THEY ARE, HOW THEY WORK, WHY THEY MATTER.
by Paul Osterman, Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation (2008). 171 pages.
Reviewed by Diane Byington, Ph.D.
 Paul Osterman brings his academic perspective from the MIT Sloan School of Management to the issue of what is happening with middle managers today. Basically, he finds that middle managers are insecure in their jobs, more loyal to their teams than to the larger corporation, and like the work they do. None of these conclusions will be a surprise to people who work within corporations, but the data-driven analysis gives his words some weight.
One of the most intriguing discussions in his book is the history and perceptions of middle managers in the overall culture. Early in the twentieth century, advances in technology permitted cheap production on a very large scale. Middle management was the key actor that facilitated the remarkable growth and efficiency of the American economy. Without middle management’s coordination of production and distribution, firms could not grow big enough to take advantage of the technological potential of mass production and low unit cost. In other words, middle managers were heroes
at first...
READ THE FULL REVIEW »
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