- 01Feb2010
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Employee Recognition: why is it so hard?
- By Ian Bradley
- 0 Comments
Just say: “good job,” it’s simple, certainly brief and surprisingly effective. As an occupational psychologist listening to stories of workplace stress and discontentment, I frequently wish that I had a communication pipeline to my clients’ bosses to whom I could whisper the above advice. For the hard working but often harassed administrative assistants who receive
- 07Jul2009
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Executive & Sports Coaching: unsettling parallels
- By Ian Bradley
- 0 Comments
I finally had enough hitting erratic backhands. Opponents were deliberately targeting my tennis backhand, and for good reason as the ball would either fly-off my too-open racquet, or alternatively, plummet into the net. In a last desperate effort before turning to racquet-ball, I engaged our club pro who coaches, not executives as I do, but
- 14May2009
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Employee Recognition and Reward (ERR) Programs: the solution
- By Ian Bradley
- 0 Comments
Here’s a follow-up to the previous post about employee recognition. Guideline #1 Form a Steering Committee Strike a small committee, comprising peer-nominated shop floor employees and managers, with the mandate of designing and promoting the employee reward and recognition program or ERR program. Once created, the committee would bear the continuing management responsibility for the
- 07May2009
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Employee Recognition and Reward (ERR) Programs: the problem
- By Ian Bradley
- 0 Comments
As a professor who teaches an undergraduate course in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy or CBT, I have many students who outright dismiss many of the “B” or behavioural aspects of CBT. Nowhere is this more event than when I talk about positive reinforcement and its role in performance management. To these students, anything associated with
- 22Apr2009
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Workplace Disability: a quantum shift
- By Ian Bradley
- 0 Comments
Let me tell you about a very strange transition that I see in my executive coaching practice. Fortunately, it happens infrequently, but when it occurs, I’m always amazed at how the rules of game shift – I think for the worse. Here’s a typical narrative involving someone that I might be seeing. An employee, invariably
- 13Mar2009
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Prediction: face the facts
- By Ian Bradley
- 0 Comments
In my executive coaching practice in Montreal, many of the business issues that I discuss with my clients concern prediction. These prediction problems are rarely conceptualized as such, instead they are couched in jargon of the particular business using words such as “forecasting,” “planning” or “analysis”. However, the underlying psychological process is prediction. For example,
- 22Feb2009
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Meetings and managed conflict
- By Ian Bradley
- 0 Comments
In my practice as an executive coach in Montreal, I often hear managers complain about the stress of conducting business meetings. Their major worry is conflict. My first response is almost always: “you’re lucky, especially if those anticipated conflicts contain the seeds of contrarian ideas that might help the business.” In today’s economic climate; heaven
- 12Feb2009
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Problem-solving: my view on coaching
- By Ian Bradley
- 0 Comments
A friend recently asked me about my practice in executive coaching. He was curious about what the major mental health problems the executives that I see in my practice face. He had in mind the typical collection of diagnostic entities such as depression, anxiety, or perhaps more behavioural deficits, such as, perfectionism or excessive self-criticism.
- 03Feb2009
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Dialectics
- By Ian Bradley
- 0 Comments
Dialectics in Sports and Business: As a psychologist involved in helping professional athletes as well as senior executives, I have found numerous similarities in the challenges facing both groups. One such similarity is the dialectical tension of two potentially opposing tendencies – individual competitive achievement and team playing. As students of philosophy appreciate, a dialectic
- 23Jan2009
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Life can be lonely at the top
- By Ian Bradley
- 0 Comments
Executive coach as a confidant Nowadays it seems that everyone has a coach- a life coach, an exercise coach even a financial coach. In my case, as an executive coach who is also a clinical psychologist, I have the advantage of being able to draw upon a vast array of psychological knowledge and techniques to