Tag: coaching

Management Books

• Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother
  "Toyota Kata gets to the essence of how Toyota manages continuous improvement and human ingenuity, through its improvement kata and coaching kata. Mike Rother explains why typical companies fail to understand the core of lean and make limited progress—and what it takes to make it a real part of your culture." —Jeffrey K. Liker, bestselling author of The Toyota Way

Management Articles

• Dee Hock on Management by M. Mitchell Waldrop, Dee Hock
  Absolutely great - definitely read the article. Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

• How to Discuss an Employee Performance Problem by Dan McCarthy
  "Knowing how to sit down with an employee and have an effective conversation about a performance problem is one of the hardest things for any manager to do, new or experienced, and should never be taken for granted. It’s also something that’s often screwed up – managers are either too vague and soft or too blunt and harsh. Both won’t get the desired results – improved performance."

• How to Discuss an Employee Performance Problem by Dan McCarthy
  "Knowing how to sit down with an employee and have an effective conversation about a performance problem is one of the hardest things for any manager to do, new or experienced, and should never be taken for granted. It’s also something that’s often screwed up – managers are either too vague and soft or too blunt and harsh. Both won’t get the desired results – improved performance."

• A Secret No One Tells New Managers by Wally Bock
  "Controlled confrontation is a key part of being a boss... Your objective is for your team member to leave your meeting thinking about what will change and not how you treated them... Start with the facts. Just the facts. Drain away the adjectives and describe the behavior or performance in neutral language. This should only take a few seconds. Move right on to describing the impact of the performance or behavior that you want to change. Describe the impact in logical and emotional terms."

• The Confusing Field of Coaching by Esther Derby
  "the Solution-focused Coaching model assumes that the person being coached has some experience solving the problem for which they have sought coaching. This model assumes that the coachee has all the competencies needed to come to a solution. ... But sometimes, the person needs context, information, demonstration, a straight answer, or a skill."

• Create a System That Lets People Take Pride in Their Work by John Hunter
  "Using the term implies that it one person empowers another person. This is not the correct view. Instead we each play a role within a system. Yes there are constraints on your actions based on the role you are playing. Does a security guard empower the CEO to enter the building? ... You don't need to think about empowering people if you have a system that lets people take pride in what they do. If you think you need to empower staff, instead fix the system that requires you to think they are in need of empowerment."

• The answer to "Will you mentor me?" is
  "I hate to sound all zen master-ey but in my experience, it doing the work that teaches you what you need to do next. Walking the path reveals more of the map. All the mentoring a truly devoted student needs is an occasional nudge here or an occasional brief warning there. Working with uncertainty is part of the learning. Waiting for mentorship/leadership/'community'/ whatever to start working is a flaw that guarantees you will never achieve anything worthwhile."

• Actionable Metrics by John Hunter
  "Metrics are valuable when they are actionable. Think about what will be done if certain results are shown by the data. If you can't think of actions you would take, it may be that metric is not worth tracking."

• Why Lean Programs Fail by Jeffrey Liker, Mike Rother
  "a large survey conducted by Industry Week in 2007 found that only 2 percent of companies achieved their anticipated results... When we look at lean in this way it is not only a set of techniques for eliminating waste, but a process by which managers as leaders develop people so that desired results can be achieved, again and again. That means coaching people in practicing an improvement kata every day."

• How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen
  "Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people... Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life's strategy... worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success."

• The Gemba Walk by Norman Bodek
  "the plant manager got up from behind his desk. He asked me to join him on his daily walk; in fact he told me that he walked the plant twice a day every day and that it was the most valuable part of his day... The plant manager asked those questions and you could see the excitement on the face of the supervisor as he was answering the questions. I learned that there’s enormous power in the leader asking questions and then just listening – yes; this is the key to ask the question and then to just listen carefully, not judgmentally."

• Rounding for Outcomes
  "Rounding for Outcomes is the consistent practice of asking specific questions of key stakeholders—leaders, employees, physicians and patients—to obtain actionable information... The focus of questions during rounding are to: > Build relationships... > Harvest "wins" to learn what is going well... > Identify process improvement areas..."

• How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted by John Hunter
  "Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them..."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Blog
  Wally Bock writes this blog to give bosses at any level - insight, information, and pointers to resources to do a better job and live a better life.

• Training Within Industry
  Blog on standardization, process improvement, training and lean manufacturing topics.

• Langford for Learning by David P. Langford
  Quality learning achieved through continual improvement of systems which aim to produce the optimum state of personal, social, physical, and intellectual development within each individual. It is a commitment to excellence by each individual and is achieved through teamwork and a process of continual improvement and/or redesign. The site includes worthwhile articles.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections by John Hunter
  The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life. The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.

• Lean Simulations
  "The focus of this site is Lean training material, ready-to-use and free. I am searching the web for lean simulations, lean games, presentations, and real world examples. Please feel free to email me your material and I will link to it or post it."