Blog posts

Stay up to date with industry trends regarding performance, productivity and motivation. Read the Perform Forward blog here.

Accountability sucks

As a concept, accountability sucks. As recently discussed, the word doesn’t really have positive connotations; but the process is also scary – to hold someone accountable is to make them your responsibility, and to be held accountable by someone else often means having someone with authority over you scrutinising your every move.
Read more

Accountability is broken

A workplace accountability study by Partners in Leadership revealed that 82% of correspondents said that they have limited to no ability to hold others accountable; in this same study, 91% of correspondents ranked accountability highly among the company’s developmental needs.
Read more

Roping Options In

Last week I wrote about making the best of the challenges that 2020 has brought across our paths and reiterated the well-known saying “There is no growth in your comfort zone”. People responded that as there is so much pain and suffering right now that it is difficult to know where to start looking for the positives. Predictably this is to be expected as most people feel worn down by the rigours of Lockdown and the unfortunate run of negative news that accompanies it. This week I prepared a social media post for Facebook. In this post I was speaking of individual versus team strengths. The challenge was for everyone to try and understand each other’s strengths as a way to understand their perspective. I used the metaphor of a rope and showed that each person’s rope is different. A rope can either provide security or it can be constricting. So, in effect the same tool can have two very different uses.
Read more

Productive Kindness and Resourcefulness

So this seems to be my new “thing”. I am totally obsessed with finding the sweet spot between “ensuring performance and results” and “being human” in business. The COVID pandemic has highlighted one of the biggest dilemmas in our modern world of work, how do we find the balance between showing empathy at work while not dropping the ball on productivity and performance.
Read more

COVID and Productive Kindness

In the past year I have often made reference to the fact that we cannot underestimate the impact of COVID on our emotional lives. I never highlighted the importance of the indirect impact of COVID. As I write this I am at the beside of my father who fell and is now being admitted to hospital with broken ribs and a broken wrist. My father is in his eighties and is frail both mentally and physically and I am responsible for his day-to-day care. Typically when I say I have this I covered, I mean really covered, from meds, to finances to small rituals and routines. This is not the first hospital visit and normally I would be able to take this in my stride, I’ve so got this. Except I don’t…..
Read more

Becoming More Tolerant

Last week I was presenting a mentoring session focused on human-centered change management. While the focus of the session was on change within the business context the question was asked how we change people’s minds to accept vaccination. Given the recent emphasis of vaccination against COVID-19 and its strains, and the strong response from anti-vaxxers, the question drew more questions around how to address racism, patronage and so on. I jokingly replied that I would solve world peace shortly. Earnestly though my advice was to have the tough conversations. It takes education to change minds – education that actually focusses on taking abroad range of perspectives into account. And that I think is the downfall of how we communicate.
Read more