A manager sits with an employee during their appraisal and shares their performance rating, walking them through why it was given and what to improve it. The employee walks out of the discussion, feeling grateful for the rating and the…
A couple of weeks back, I had come across a post on LinkedIn. An employee had sent a sick leave application email to HR copying his manager, the founder. The response from the founder was to HR – “Mark this…
Outside of family, most relationships at work sit somewhere on a spectrum. Colleagues, acquaintances, well-wishers, and the occasional genuine friend. The lines between them are sometimes clear. Most of the time, it is not. The majority of us would either…
An organization that runs a well-built QBR process can learn a lot from it over time. The agenda is fixed. The right people are in the room. The flow is managed well. The action items have owners and dates. The…
The only question worth asking Did anything change because of this meeting? This was the note we ended Part 1 with. That question is crucial for both designing and measuring the effectiveness of the meeting. Who needs to be in…
Walk into any company running a quarterly business review (QBR, going forward) and ask five people in the room what that meeting is for. You will likely get five different answers. Finance will say “We need to know what is…
Empowerment. One of the buzzwords of this century, that has been taken in many different contexts (and in many places, without context) and applied recklessly in some. Every founder/leader likes to think that they have empowered their teams fully. Every…
The first issue of Course Corrections made one argument: the appraisal system is not broken so much as it is working exactly as it was built to. A financial instrument wearing the clothing of personal development. That issue was about…
The wave of layoffs over the last two years has been on my mind for quite a while. While the scale is visible, what is hidden from most of us is what preceded each one. In many cases, there would…
