GL Ford Consulting

Full-time employees spend 2080 hours a year (minimum) at work.  Imagine spending those hours in drama free surroundings: No difficult personalities to deal with, no festering conflict below the surface-able to focus on getting your job done and having energy at the end of the day. It’s more possible than you might imagine, and this workshop, Creating a Drama Free Workplace, will provide you with practical tools for getting there. Read Full Post

Employees are hired for their technical expertise, but whether they succeed or fail has a lot to do with the squishy stuff: interpersonal skills, ability to establish credibility, ability to win support for ideas without resorting to power plays, ability to foster strong relationships with colleagues, ability to motivate staff.  The squishy stuff is critical to any employee’s success and yet managers frequently delay addressing performance problems that are squishy–because, well, they’re squishy.  Hard to define, hard to address, hard to solve for. When I had a staff of 65, I never had difficulty addressing performance problems with my staff when the issue was cut and dry: missing a deadline, work quality where hard metrics were involved, attendance or punctuality issues that had a negative impact.  The squishy stuff was always harder.  Here are some tips for addressing the squishier issues that create business problems in the workplace. Read Full Post

There’s a lot written about the traits of strong leaders, and yet there are some common traits among our organizations’ worst managers, which are also worth noting, and which are particularly relevant at the present moment. Poor managers shift the bulk of the work to their highest performers while simultaneously doing little or nothing to develop or correct the performance of low performers.  This approach can get the job done in the short run.  In the long term it burns out your stars, rewards your low performers, and sends a demotivating message to the general population: there are no consequences for poor performance, and the reward for hard work is more hard work. Read Full Post

“If you put a gun to his head, could he do it?”  This was the startling question I learned to ask when I was first introduced to Human Performance Technology (HPT) in the early 90s.  HPT is concerned with improving employee performance, and it considers a larger system context of people’s performance.  A very simplistic (and rather disturbing) way of looking at the larger context is to ask, “Could he meet performance expectations if his life depended on it?”  If the answer is “yes,” then the current performance issue is likely not a question of the employee’s ability but perhaps a question of motivation or confidence.   If the answer is “no,” then  it may be a matter of ability or the employee may not have the right tools or technology at her disposal to perform as expected.  The gun to the head question uncovers whether a low performing employee needs training and follow up coaching (ability) OR  a discussion about the consequences of continued poor performance and potential corrective action (willingness). Read Full Post

For 8 years I served as a Human Resources Manager for a marquee video-game manufacturer.  Every week, employees came to my office and told me with 100% certainty who in the organization wasn’t pulling his or her weight, wasn’t up to the job, wasn’t managing as he or she should have been. Now an independent external trainer, I hear weekly from one or more participants that “my boss (my colleague, my staff member) is the one who needs to be learning this—not me!” Recently, I was facilitating a leadership series for a corporate client, and the group was so focused on their frustration with the next level of management that we weren’t making progress in the session.  Finally I said, “Look, your organization has made an investment in this learning for you.  You have a choice.  You can bemoan the fact that you’re frustrated with your managers and wish they were here learning with you, or you can focus on the only thing you actually have influence over: YOUR behaviors, YOUR actions, YOUR decisions.  You can be open to engaging in this process, focus on learning something that will make you more effective, and actively look for what you can do to make your organization better—or you can continue to complain among yourselves about people who aren’t in this room.  What is your decision?” Read Full Post

Successful people tent to believe they are successful because of 100% of what they do.  What’s closer to the truth is that the are successful due to 90% of what the do and in spite of 10% of what they do.  For personal growth, we sometimes need an objective mirror.  My public workshop on October 1st will help you with the following: Read Full Post