Human Performance

A few years ago, a VP of Sales called me in a mild panic. Her representatives were closing deals more slowly than ever, the pipeline was backing up, and she needed it fixed before the quarter closed. Her diagnosis was already complete by the time she got on the call. "We need a negotiation skills workshop," she said. "Something sharp, something practical, two days max." A group of professionals attentively engages in a corporate training session in a modern conference room, w

A demotivated employee sleeping at work There's a meeting I've sat through as a Learning and Performance Consultant more times than I can count, and honestly, it deserves a name. I call it root cause theater. Here's how it usually goes. Leadership calls a meeting to solve some performance problem. Somebody opens with "let's get to the root cause here." Everyone nods along, feeling pretty good about it, genuinely believing real diagnostic work is about to happen. Then, like fo

So a director calls me up, and he's got this request that sounds almost too simple. His project managers keep missing deadlines. Running over budget too. And he's already got the fix figured out. Pay them more to stop doing that. A bonus, split fifty-fifty between hitting the deadline and hitting the budget. Honestly? It's not a crazy idea. You want a behavior, you reward it. That's basic management stuff. But then we actually started digging into what was going on, and the w