The most powerful question all facilitators must ask

The most powerful question all facilitators must ask

Earlier this year, ATD invited me to be a guest expert and create a series of instructional videos where I share insider tips from my 25+ year career in talent development.

In this one, I explain the one powerful question all facilitators must ask.

Whether you're facilitating a meeting, a client presentation, or a training or learning session or workshop, you're trying to engage your audience to actively participate. To be a truly engaging facilitator, you want to ensure you invite your audience members to ask questions and actively participate.

But HOW you ask for their questions -- that's something I want to get you to think about today.

Read More

It takes two to tango: Rebuilding trust starts with one question

It takes two to tango: Rebuilding trust starts with one question

Last week, while I was facilitating a ‘Building Trusting Relationships in the Workplace’ workshop for one of my clients, a participant had an epiphany.

We were discussing how to build trust and repair broken trust.

This outspoken learner piped up about a damaged workplace relationship and the problems with the other person in it.

So I asked her this question that stopped her dead in her tracks…

I’ll share this question with you here, but let’s first talk about trust building.

Read More

3 typical team development ‘Yeah, but’ challenges and how to respond to them

3 typical team development ‘Yeah, but’ challenges and how to respond to them

During a recent delivery of one of my popular client workshops, Team Power, about how to develop high performing teams, we discussed seven common team development stages (I am partial to using the Drexler/Sibbert model). We also identified structural supports that help teams function optimally, reviewed the importance of trust in teams and ways to build it, discussed important team communication dynamics, and practiced applying this team development knowledge in a simulated team work situation, culminating with each learner creating an action plan for applying team dynamic best practices within their own team.

As usual, the learners were highly engaged and interested.

Also as usual, they still had some challenges they were grappling with, which came out in the form of what I call “’Yeah, but’s”.

Read More

YES! We should ditch performance appraisals!

YES! We should ditch performance appraisals!

There’s a tide of supporting evidence rising for why we should really ditch performance appraisals as we know them. Over the past year, I’ve been lucky to work with two different large clients to help them do just that. Here’s what I’ve learned so far from the research, preparation, and roll-outs of these huge cultural changes:

Read More

How to Leverage Lunchtime for Learning

How to Leverage Lunchtime for Learning

You might have been exposed to the idea of Lunchtime Learning before. Sometimes called Brown Bag Training or Lunch ‘n Learn (beware – that’s a trademarked phrase!), it’s a short (45-90 minutes) learning session held during lunchtime. What’s so special about these Brown-Bag Sessions, you say? Invite employees to do the teaching, not just the learning! In this post, I lay out the what, who, why, and how of creating a 3-way win for employee development in any organization.

Read More

How to be a relevant employee or boss AND up your own professional game

How to be a relevant employee or boss AND up your own professional game

On Tuesday, I gave a talk at the Positive Business DC meetup in the suburbs of DC about ways to develop employees outside the classroom and on a tight budget. It was anchored in my book, Employee Development on a Shoestring. The audience members were highly engaged and enjoyed the interactive exercises and small group discussions. I'm pleased that this talk has resulted in two different reviews on two blogs, and thought I'd share them here with you.

Read More

Employee Development Done Right: ASTD Interviews Halelly Azulay

Employee Development Done Right: ASTD Interviews Halelly Azulay
Listen to a short and upbeat interview by ASTD's Ann Parker in which Halelly Azulay discusses why employee development is as important as ever even in the current workplace climate, how to ensure employee development strategies are beneficial to both the employee and the organization, and how to implement good employee development strategies in your organization.
Read More

The Surprising Truth About Why Money Doesn't Matter in Employee Development

The Surprising Truth About Why Money Doesn't Matter in Employee Development
Let me share three surprising truths about why money should not even be in the equation when you’re making decisions about employee development. Then, I’ll share with you a great opportunity to not only generate multiple, creative, and cheap ideas for how to develop your people, but actually build bullet-proof strategies for easily and quickly implement them in your organization with stakeholder support in my upcoming intensive workshop on Employee Development on a Shoestring.
Read More

The Ultimate New Year's Resolution: Make 2014 Your Year of Fast Learning!

The Ultimate New Year's Resolution: Make 2014 Your Year of Fast Learning!
With a New Year upon us, everyone else is posting about how to set goals and make New Year's resolutions. In this post, you can learn about how to make the ultimate New Year's Resolution - you can learn new skills and habits fast using a 4 step process from Josh Kaufman and lots of other resources. Learn 12 new habits in 2014 if you apply this model to learn one new skill each month of the year. What are you going to learn in 2014?
Read More

Inspiration at Work Radio Interview

ASTD2012 booksigning photo1.JPG

May 6-9, 2012, I attended the ASTD International Conference and Exposition in beautiful Denver, Colorado to learn about the latest and greatest in the training and development field as well as to be one of the speakers and authors they featured. It was a pleasure to soak in ideas and meet amazing people (there were over 9,000 professionals from over 70 countries there with me). I came away inspired and energized. (Here's a great collection of the conference's backchannel and resources, curated by learning professional David Kelly.)

While there, I met up with colleagues Larry Mohl and Terry Barber, of Performance Inspired, who were operating an on-site BlogTalk Radio station. I was invited to record a short interview with Larry Mohl to talk about inspiration at work. Have a listen: 

Listen to

internet radio

with

Inspiration At Work

on Blog Talk Radio

I'd love to know your answer to one of the questions Larry asked me:

What drives you - what inspires you?

_________________________________

PS - have you subscribed to my blog yet? If not - I invite you to subscribe today! It's free and easy - just enter your email address in the field provided in the right-hand column here. Thanks! ------------>


Sign up to my free weekly newsletter and get more actionable tips and ideas for making yourself a better leader and a more effective communicator! It’s very short and relevant with quick tips, links, and news about leadership, communication, and self-development. Sign up now!

Also, subscribe to my podcast, The TalentGrow Show, on iTunes to always be the first in the know about new episodes of The TalentGrow Show! http://apple.co/1NiWyZo

You Might Also Like These Posts:

The 3 Secrets of Motivating and Inspiring Others

Visionary or Realist?

The best question to boost your courage in the face of fear

Can Your Social Learning Strategy Succeed? 8 Tips to Help

I am featured as a guest blogger on the ASTD website once again, this time in the Learning Circuits Newsletter. My post describes the basics of what Social Learning is and provides eight useful tips to help make your social learning implementation a success. Please check it out and let me know what you think!


Sign up to my free weekly newsletter and get more actionable tips and ideas for making yourself a better leader and a more effective communicator! It’s very short and relevant with quick tips, links, and news about leadership, communication, and self-development. Sign up now!

Also, subscribe to my podcast, The TalentGrow Show, on iTunes to always be the first in the know about new episodes of The TalentGrow Show! http://apple.co/1NiWyZo

You Might Also Like These Posts:

Social Learning and Employee Development: Webcast Recording

Social Learning as an Employee Development Solution

5 Ways to Develop Employees without Spending a Dime

Halelly Goes to Vlogland - Welcome, and 2 Requests

What are your big goals for this year? How are you forwarding your action on achieving them?

Well one of my goals this year was to venture into the wonderful world of video blogging. And I've decided to just leap into the deep end. So - here is my first 'vlog'. I hope you like it - and please give me suggestions and feedback. Thanks! 

TRANSCRIPT

Halelly: Hi. This is Halelly, from TalentGrow, and welcome to my first video blog, or vlog. I wrote down my goals for 2012 and this is one of them – I want to create more video delivery of content. I write in my blog, I wrote a book, I speak with clients via my workshops and my conference presentations and my training and facilitation work and teambuilding, but I’ve never done a video. So I decided, why not? Let’s do it.

You write down a goal, you have to write down what actions you’re going to take to make that goal a reality. There has to be something that you can do everyday, or at least every week, to move you every big closer to achieving that goal, even if it’s just baby steps. Because stuff gets in the way. Emergencies, crises, other people’s priorities, all can actually hijack your goal. And sometimes if we don’t revisit them on a regular basis, they can go to the wayside. And that’s a shame, because your goals are what’s important to you. It’s what you decided you really want to do. So I hope I encourage you to work on your goals, not to forget them.

So, this is my attempt to take a baby step and so I decided that my very first vlog will be one that’s kind of easy because I’m just going to make it public. Now I can’t back out because everybody knows I’m planning doing vlogs. And I also want to ask you – I actually have two requests. The first request I have for you is for suggestions on content. What topics would you like me to talk about in short segments, about three, four minute segments, that don’t take a long time to listen to or to watch, but that bring you value, that teach you something new or give you an idea or make you think of something in a different way. You know, the topics I usually focus on are related to leadership and communication, especially interpersonal communication in the workplace, related to employee development and employee learning, and also related to working in teams and to emotional intelligence, especially at work.

So what do you want to hear about? Do you have a special challenge or a particular question, something that came up that’s been bugging you or you weren’t sure if you handled it the best way? Please share with me any ideas you have, because that’s going to be really helpful. As I said, I’ve lined up some ideas already, but I’d love to hear what will make it valuable for you. So that’s my first request, what content would you like me to share with you?

My second request is for feedback. All of us see ourselves as we can, but we don’t really know how other people see us. We don’t really know what effect or impact we’re having. We know what our intentions are, but not our impact. So I really need to know, how am I doing? What could I do differently to make this better? I’d love for some specific suggestions from you, and you can put them into the comments, you can send them to me in the various social media. I’m very active in social media. Or you can just email them to me, halelly@talentgrow.com is my email address. And I would love to hear from you. It’s going to make it really much better for you and for me because my goal is to give you quality and useful content. So thank you so much for watching, and listening to my first vlog. And I really look forward to connecting with you soon. Have a wonderful day and let’s make this the best year yet. Take care.


Sign up to my free weekly newsletter and get more actionable tips and ideas for making yourself a better leader and a more effective communicator! It’s very short and relevant with quick tips, links, and news about leadership, communication, and self-development. Sign up now

Also, subscribe to my podcast, The TalentGrow Show, on iTunes to always be the first in the know about new episodes of The TalentGrow Show! http://apple.co/1NiWyZo 

You Might Also Like These Posts:

Halelly goes to Hollywood

FOCUS: The secret to crushing your goals in 2016 and beyond

Visionary or Realist?