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The 3 Rules of Good Coaching

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Inspiration for this column comes from revisiting the teaching tenets of legendary Baltimore Oriole baseball coach Cal Ripken, Senior. Cal Senior was with the franchise as player, coach, manager, and scout for 36 years. He was hugely responsible for the Baltimore Orioles’ sustained excellence during the franchise’s glory years. He created and taught developing players […]

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How to Turn A Negative Situation Into A Positive Experiences

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I came across an article in Inc. magazine recently that really lit my tail on fire. In it, the author shared his opinion of how to criticize employees. Basically speaking, his advice was to berate and browbeat your people so they’ll straighten up and perform better. Everything about his approach and techniques rankled me as […]

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Why Good Talent Leaves

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Talented people choose to leave organizations for a simple reason: Talent has options. The further you slide back along the excellence curve, the fewer options those lesser performers will have. Because of that, mediocrity tends to stay. But top performers live with a different realism. They will be courted by other companies, recruited by headhunters, […]

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Difficult Conversations: 10 Tips

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As more people withdraw to keyboards interactions instead of talking over the telephone or in-person, interactive effectiveness when confronted with a difficult conversation is diminished for two reasons: lack of comfort and lack of experience. Tortuous to the uninitiated, experience makes them easier. Conflict resolution is sometimes a choice, sometimes a necessity. When faced with […]

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Why Millennials Are the Most Stressed Out Generation

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A recent survey commissioned by the American Psychological Association measured the relative stress levels of four generations: Matures (Post-WWII workers, aged 67+) Boomers (48-to-66) Gen Xers (34-to-47) Millennials (Gen Y, ages 18-to-33) For clarity’s sake, we’ll define anxiety and stress this way: “The unpleasant emotional state consisting of psychological and physiological responses to anticipation of […]

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Why Many Sales Coaches Aren’t as Good as They Think

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I read an article recently from the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) in Washington, D. C. that shed some light on the dearth of coaches and excess of managers (and micromanagers) in many sales organizations. The culprits: situation and circumstance. It also seems that a perception gap exists between how sales managers see themselves as coaches […]

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Why Worker Burnout is Escalating at an Alarming Rate

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ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based employee assistance consulting company, recently release some startling information based on a survey of nearly 2,000 workers. Since ComPsych provides programs for more than 17,000 organizations and 45 million employees worldwide, they are in a strong position to accurately read the pulse of the current American work force. A couple key […]

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6 Reasons Why Your First Loss is Usually Your Best Loss

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Financial decisions, especially those made during tight economic times, are harder to make than those of previous times of prosperity. Especially dicey are tough calls that demand a difficult decision to hang on or cut the cord. No one makes the right decision all the time, but some draw better conclusions than others. Listed below […]

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Never Lose Sight of Your Best Alternative

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Choices — and the decisions we make — determine which roads we travel. Some of those decisions will be right, some wrong, and a few may require a U-turn and do-over. All of this is fine and normal. Little in life follows a straight, predictable path. Because decision-making is an imprecise science, life is never […]

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