A few must read blogs posts I wanted to share with all of you:

By now, you’ve probably seen (or at least heard) of Susan Boyle, a contestant on the show Britain’s Got Talent. Peter Bregman has a great post over at the Harvard Business Blog on how Susan Boyle is a great lesson in talent management. Her talent wasn’t obvious based on her appearance, she was an unexpected contender who is now expected to win the competition. For managers, the lesson Bregman shares is that “Great managers see the unique talents of each employee, and then create the role that’s a perfect vehicle for those talents.” This post does a solid job of explaining why managers as coaches should do this and how this benefits the organization as a whole.

Bersin & Associates recently published The Top 22 for Talent Management, which is based on two years of research and analysis. They found that these 22 talent management practices “drive the highest business impact.” You can check out the full top 22 list here.

I wanted to discuss the list because it provides a tangible and well-researched analysis that can be used to help guide, and justify your talent management strategy. The top best [...]

Last week I picked up a study from Chief Learning Officer through this post at on The HR Capitalist. The study, “The Coaching Conundrum 2008” looked at some of the challenges that managers face when it comes to coaching. The study was conducted by BlessingWhite and surveyed 710 North American managers.

The two biggest challenges? Not having all the answers and coaching takes too long, at 30 and 29 percent respectively. I don’t [...]

Performance maintenance is a dynamic process with three parts — performance management, recognition, and discipline—that gives managers a full-spectrum of tools to manage the activities of others. The goal of each tool is productivity. These tools can be used for high, low, and average performers. Performance maintenance makes the assumption that most employees perform well most of the time and good supervision keeps them on track. However, for the 10-20% whose performance is noteworthy, or [...]