Hiring Top Talent

When a team starts to lose its edge, the instinct is to look for someone or something to blame. Leaders pull up performance reviews. They scan for obvious errors. They try to trace where things went off track. Most of the time, there’s no single moment and no single person at fault. That’s because the real problem isn’t a breakdown. It’s a misread. Someone decided a quiet colleague was disengaged. A manager read a direct communication style as arrogance. A team member assumed a cautious decision-maker was stalling. None of those reads were malicious. Most weren’t even conscious. But all… Read More »What Looks Like a Team Problem Is Usually a Perception Problem, and It’s Costing You

Google’s 2012 Project Aristotle provided groundbreaking research on what drives team effectiveness and high performance1. After studying over 180 teams, they found that the top-performing groups weren’t defined by who was on the team, but by how the team worked together. The most important factor was psychological safety, which refers to the ability to speak up, challenge ideas, and take risks without fear. It reshaped how leaders think about teams, but offered little guidance on what to do next. While the concept of psychological safety is easy enough to grasp, building it consistently across an organization is more challenging. This… Read More »Google’s Project Aristotle Changed How We Think About Teams. Personality Insight Changes How They Perform

For decades, competency frameworks have helped organizations define what good performance looks like and guide how people grow. They bring structure, consistency, and a shared language to hiring, development, and evaluation. But they were never designed to explain everything. Most competency models answer one question well: What does strong performance look like? What they don’t answer is just as important: What does it take to sustain it? What competencies capture, and what they miss Competencies are often brought to life through tools like 360 feedback, which assess how consistently individuals demonstrate expected behaviors. Together, they help define what strong performance… Read More »The Gap in Every Competency Framework, and How Work Dimensions Fills it

High performer burnout rarely looks like failure. More often, it shows up in individuals who continue to meet expectations long after their experience of the work has started to shift. Two people can operate at a similarly high level, receive consistent positive feedback, and be seen as equally capable. Their performance reviews are strong, their contributions are valued, and they are trusted with increasingly important work. From the outside, there is little to suggest a difference between them. Over time, however, their experience begins to hit a fork in the road. One grows into the role with a sense of… Read More »Why High Performers Burn Out Even When They’re Succeeding

Managers are leading in a work environment that looks nothing like it did even five years ago. Distributed teams. Digital overload. Economic pressure. AI transformation. Constant change. Through it all, one truth remains: managers have an outsized influence on employee engagement and team performance.  Gallup estimates they influence roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement1, not because they create it alone, but because their daily behaviours inform the environment. Setting expectations, building trust, responding under pressure, and connecting people to purpose all influence how work gets done. Yet many are navigating this complexity without the support or structure required… Read More »Why Manager Engagement Is the Key to Team Performance

For years, companies have tried to boost employee engagement from the bottom up. They survey workers, invest in wellness programs, and encourage leaders to check in more often. But engagement rarely rises or falls because of initiatives aimed at frontline employees. It rises and falls with managers. Today’s managers are carrying a level of strain that looks very different from even a decade ago. Their role no longer centers on supervising work. They are expected to translate shifting priorities, navigate uncertainty, coach employees through stress, and keep teams aligned even as demands change around them. The problem is not simply… Read More »How to Support Your Managers at Scale (and Stop the Burnout)