Regular 1-on-1 meeting with direct reports is the most potent tool in the hands of managers. Research tells us that it has an enormous impact on the team’s motivation, engagement, and productivity. Yet most managers don’t do it regularly. — If you ask any manager whether they should be doing 1-on-1s or not, most will say “Yes”. Today, they go through an abundance of training and read enough articles to know they should be doing regular 1-on-1s with their team. But yet they don’t do it regularly.

The last few years have seen a major shift in how companies manage employee performance. — From the earlier model of once a year process focused on evaluating employees, the trend now is towards continuous performance management with regular conversations focused on employee development and performance coaching. The trend started in large software and consulting companies with companies like Adobe, Google, Deloitte, etc. …

Caring about the team’s growth and development can have a huge impact on their motivation. — Helping your direct reports in their growth and development is one of the key responsibilities of any manager. When done well, research shows, that it has an enormous impact on employee motivation, engagement, and ownership behavior. And yet, very few managers do a good job of having career conversations with…

Large companies spend millions on managerial capability development every year. Is there a better approach? — Today, we see many start-ups focusing only on achieving the business goals and growth, and things like manager capability development and culture building take a back seat. You can’t argue against it. In the initial year years revenue and growth matters. …

Treat 1-on-1s like a journey with different stages where the manager and the employee discuss a variety of topics depending on what is going on in the company, team, and with the individual employee — The one-on-one meetings can be a truly valuable tool for managers to keep employees engaged and motivated to do their best work. I have been doing 1-on-1s regularly with my teams. I have worked with both kinds of managers — ones who did regular 1-on-1s and the ones who didn’t…

The first step towards improving an organization’s productivity is to measure the current productivity level. Only when you know the current productivity level of the organization, you can work towards improving it. So how do you measure productivity? Measuring productivity is easier at the organization level. This is because you…

I remember, five years back, before I went for my MBA, nobody was talking about digital transformation. There were start-ups, the smartphone market was booming, interesting apps were coming up, there was analytics, there was even digital marketing — but still nobody was talking about digital transformation. So what has…