At Insight, it’s no question what tool yields the most useful assessments: the Kolbe Wisdom™ system. We’ve used Kolbe for over twelve years now because it’s different from the other indexes; it neither seeks to identify personality style (affective) nor to measure intellect (cognitive), either of which the majority of other tools seek to do.

The Kolbe A, B and C Indexes® provide a holistic understanding of the natural instincts and unique talents of each employee. Understanding these instincts enables you to form synergistic teams and empowers managers to develop effective approaches for successful leadership. Any size company can benefit from the Kolbe Wisdom® system.

Achieving a goal should yield growth, so make sure that each goal you set is attainable, but isn’t such a breeze to accomplish that it requires little to no effort. That means that a goal must be specific, too, so that the employee and the manager have a metric and can clearly see whether it’s been met.

A performance management system like BLOOM aligns your business objectives with employee goals. It enables employees and managers to keep track of goals and performance, and it enables HR to identify top performers as well as employees who are at or below average.

Have you ever tried a new diet or committed to a New Year’s resolution only to lose momentum a week or two in? Have you asked a friend to check in on your progress or—even better—to join you? That’s a form of peer coaching that helps with accountability, and it’s just as applicable in the office as in the gym.

Before the economic downturn, SHRM reported in 2006 that 40% of workers were likely to change jobs when the economy turns. Has it happened? At Insight, we have used this statistic for years.

Think about why and how you use (or would use) a talent management system. Just to keep track of employee performance and compensation data?

When thinking about your organization’s future, it’s important to think not only about goals, objectives, and initiatives, but obviously how to achieve them. A major contributor is obviously your employees.

It’s relatively easy to recite pieces of performance reviews without really thinking about the function they serve or the value they provide. The purpose of performance management is to align employee efforts with business strategies for accurate performance evaluation and feedback for success.

Making the switch to “performance planning” is more than semantics. It’s a shift in mindset that signals a commitment to developing your employees and supporting their career goals.

In his November 2009 article “The use and abuse of scenarios,” Charles Roxburgh discusses the ways that scenario planning helps leaders to identify extreme events and their potential outcomes and responses. He notes four features that lead to understanding uncertainty and developing strategy:

To achieve a true mindset of innovation takes commitment. Kuczmarski submits that eight building blocks that rest on three interconnected platforms: