How Intel Is Driving Higher Performance

Explore how Intel piloted a new strategy for performance reviews, moving away from a once-a-year backward-looking review to more frequent, forward-looking conversations. Director of Performance Solutions at Intel Corporation Devra Johnson speaks candidly about why it is essential to get clear on the purpose of the performance review, the debate on labels and ratings, and the delicate tension between driving change and non-disruption.

Our Take: Why Your Coaching Skills Initiative Isn't Sticking

HR and L&D leaders struggle with getting the most out of organizational training and achieving true behavioural change. One of the things we commonly hear from companies that contact Box of Crayons is “We’ve tried coaching programs, but they haven’t stuck. How is yours different?” This fascinating article via Quartz delves into the science of learning — and how to overcome the “forgetting curve” through “spaced repetition.” It also offers insights into why we’ve structured our program and post-program support in a way that encourages a drip irrigation approach rather than a flash-flood one.

How to Provoke Transformation through Design

Ayse Birsel is a New York–based designer and the creator of Design the Life You Love, which is both a book and a program. She’s been identified by Fast Company as one of the world’s most creative people and has been cited by Thinkers50 as an emerging thinker with the potential to make lasting contributions to management theory and practice. Ayse many not be a coach in the traditional sense, but certainly all the work she puts out into the world is about being coach-like. Ayse talks about the importance of process and viewing any project through the lens of design, which positions empathy and putting oneself in other people’s shoes at the centre of problem-solving. As HR becomes more and more concerned with employee experience, the people-focused approach of design thinking will become the new standard.

The Feedback Factor

If you are looking to build a culture of higher-quality, ongoing feedback to more fully engage your millennial employees (or any segment of your organization, for that matter), you’ll want to know about the TERA Quotient model, which provides a powerful framework that ensures your managers’ feedback is understood and acted upon. Discover what it is and how it works in this exclusive to our community. (Feel free to share it with your HR colleagues.)

Making Coaching Work

In “How to Make Coaching Work,” the fourth section of the Truth & Lies of Performance Management report, we share our finding that only 16% of companies have leaders who ensure that ongoing coaching is happening, and that in more than half of the organizations we surveyed, support from managers is hit-and-miss.

It’s not enough to put managers through training; you must also remove the subtle barriers that get in the way of coaching being taken up — and change the behaviour of the people who work in your organization. “How to Make Coaching Work” outlines how to overcome those barriers and obstacles. You can watch Michael talk about the section here.