The Performance Ledger

The Emotional Sponge You glance over at the clock in your office. It’s 4:57pm. You’re beat! The mental wear and tear of the day has weighed down on you. You had back to back meetings today. You mediated a heated dispute between management. Listened to multiple grievances for the same team. You conducted a very emotional exit interview, and you finalized a termination for an employee who you know has a growing family. Human resources tends to be the emotional sponge of the org

It's almost 2pm in the afternoon and that heavy lunch is catching up to you. You realize you're starting to feel a bit sluggish, so you decide to head into the break room and grab a cup of coffee. You enter the room and see two employees, a man and woman, are already chatting at the machine. You politely hang back and wait for them to finish making their cups. As you do, you overhear some of their conversation. “Did you check the site yet?” the woman asks. “Yea, I did.” He qu

You've just walked out of a strategic planning meeting with your HR leadership and the numbers aren't looking too good. Turnover has crept up from last quarter. It's taking too long to fill open positions and you're starting to see where bottlenecks are forming. If things keep up at this pace, you are going to see major delays in roadmap delivery. The company just completed a series c investment round, so delays are not an option. This talent leak needs to get fixed and fast.

The Stress Response Gap Let me set the scene for you. Let's say you're sitting in the conference room for a team meeting. Your manager suggests a change you can make to a project you're working on. Rather than seeing it as helpful, you receive this feedback as a total personal attack. Your heart starts racing and you immediately become defensive. Obviously he's just trying to make you look bad in the meeting, right? Let’s now take a step back as the observers. We'll assume t

Survey Says Your director of account management walks into your office. He’s flustered. He plops down in the chair on the other side of your desk. He isn’t saying anything yet. You know he had a meeting scheduled today with your company’s largest client. From the look on his face, it didn’t go too well. You wait for him to speak as you brace for impact. He finally lets out a huge sigh and says, “They want to renegotiate their contract before renewal. They gave me a list of pr

The Irony of Effort You sit at your desk staring blankly at the monitor. “What was I about to write?” You quietly ask yourself. Your hands are gently floating over the keyboard, waiting for you to type your next thought. Ever since that last meeting, you've had to pause and catch your thoughts like this about 4 times. You know exactly what you need to say in your document, but for some reason the idea keeps slipping away. Does this feeling sound familiar? There's a huge diffe

The Vicious Cycle Imagine you're a software engineer. Your eyes are glued to your computer screens. Bing. An email notification pops up. It's from the client team. The email preview displays a single sentence: “I need an update!” You glance up and your manager is headed over to your cubicle. The look on his face matches the stress you feel. He arrives at your desk. You pound away at the keyboard and once again, your eyes are fixated on the double monitors. “How's it looking?”

The Data: The Rising Cost of Losing People Let's say you're standing in the middle of a ballroom at a networking event for small to mid-sized business owners. You work your way around the room chatting and asking questions to various business owners and you notice one theme continually pops up. “Good help is hard to find.” I have heard more business owners say this than I can count. What often goes unmentioned from that conversation is the financial toll it takes on your busi

The Invisible Operating System If we were to dissect your brain, where would we find your memories? Would someone looking at the brain be able to physically see a memory of you graduating from school? What about birthdays, or holidays with family? Obviously the answer is no, right? Yet, our memories, our beliefs, and our self-image are all real. They are just not seen by the naked eye. But why? Because the brain and the mind are not the same thing. I'll explain more on this i

The Performance Paradox When the sales team isn’t hitting the mark on their sales quota, most sales leaders start by looking at the pipeline and monitoring activity. The truth is, you’re most likely overlooking the one thing you can’t see on a spreadsheet or walking through the aisles of the office... what’s going on in your salesperson’s head. Research from Gartner shows us stressed or overwhelmed sales reps are 45% less likely to hit their sales quota compared to their regu