Online Articles

By Sean Tierney, VP, Activate Networks What makes for a worthwhile executive coaching engagement? Personality inventories and 360-degree reviews long have been standard fare for coaches, but now there’s a tool that provides detailed information about what may be an executive’s most critical resource: his or her network of relationships. Many professionals have used this tool—Personal Network Assessment (PNA)—to look beyond the larger organization to their own networks of professional and personal ties.

By Dick Handshaw, President, Handshaw, Inc. This has been a challenging year for internal training departments. Our company has seen many organizations go through major reorganizations in 2012. And with every reorganization, we have seen layoffs of trainers and instructional designers. Where is the role of performance consulting in these organizations? In many cases, it has been difficult to find evidence of a performance improvement effort.

By Christian Arno, Founder, Lingo24 Here’s a question for you: Is your sales staff motivated and performing at its best? If you didn’t respond with an emphatic “Yes!” you’re not alone. No matter how highly you value your staff, when it comes to performance, there is almost always room for improvement.

Not so long ago, power within organizations came from the commands of top executives. Leaders drove performance by devising strategic objectives, which they translated into directives that passed down to employees, whose job was merely to take orders and to act on those orders. Today that model has fallen apart.

By Jennifer Lawrence, Founder, Cambridge Corporate Training Once a company decides to pursue a global training program and reaches shared agreement on how to define and develop the initiative, the instructional design team can take the next step: deciding what content to offer and how to design instruction to deliver it. Perhaps the most important topic for a global training program—and thus, an excellent place to begin—is communication. This article explains:

By Dianne Wasson, Vice President & Affinity Lending Manager, HomeStreet Bank Back in the early 1990s, the city of Seattle faced a challenge. Due to the high costs of living in the city, police and fire department employees were forced to live in surrounding suburbs and neighboring cities, resulting in lengthier commutes. For these critical employees, response time—and hence proximity—was an issue.

By Ray Shaw and Michael Chiariello, Founders, Internships Italia There is little doubt of the value of studying abroad. This is particularly true for U.S. students who are aware of emergence of a new order in the Third Millennium. As a recent federal study reports, “Modern science, technology, and the internationalization of labor and commerce are changing the established order of things.”

Cara Hale Alter has spent two decades studying why some smart, capable people project credibility and others don’t. Those who don’t project credibility often struggle to succeed, particularly in today’s recession-weary workplace and job market. Alter has identified 25 specific visual and auditory cues that affect the perception of credibility. And unlike countless other cues, such as gender, age, or physical features, these 25 cues are “within your active control,” she says.

By Margery Weinstein During 2008, The Progressive Group of Insurance Companies Contact Centers conducted a pilot to determine the impact of allowing contact center representatives to work from home. Based on the success of this pilot, additional participants were added. As of July 2011, the company had 500 reps working from home. The effort required significant collaboration between leadership, Human Resources, workforce management, information technology, and training.

By Thomas J. Walter and Molly Meyer Perhaps you’ve heard about this phenomenon via television shows or movies. Maybe you’ve read about it in books and articles. Maybe your friends or family members have boasted about experiencing it, but you’re still not convinced it’s real. How does it feel to truly love the place you work, and does your workplace truly love you? Is a loving relationship between you even possible?