Show Notes
915. Your team missed the deadline, and the reasons are starting to sound like excuses. The instinct is to push harder: tighter check-ins, a firmer performance conversation, more pressure applied in the same direction. But the fastest move and the most useful move are rarely the same one. In this episode, Rachel Cooke walks through five self-directed questions she uses with coaching clients whose teams have stalled, from "what if I'm wrong" to "can you define good" to "what distance have you already traveled."
Modern Mentor is a Quick and Dirty Tips Podcast, hosted by Rachel Cooke! Find more from Rachel at LeadAboveNoise.com. Have a question for Modern Mentor? Email: [email protected] Discover more from Modern Mentor! Facebook LinkedIn Newsletter Transcripts available on your podcast app or QuickandDirtyTips.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Modern Mentor
918. You need to open a meeting, and the usual icebreaker makes everyone cringe. Chosen with intention, a warmup does real work by warming up the exact muscles a team needs for the job in front of it. Rachel Cooke shares five of her favorites, from reflection cards to a Would You Rather deck. She explains how she matches each one to what the meeting needs to accomplish, whether that’s getting a stuck team to decide, building trust for a hard conversation or helping a new team connect.
917. Lots of teams have quietly stopped being teams. They're capable people sprinting in their own directions, connected by a reporting line and little else. Rachel Cooke explains why that fragmentation is lonely for people and expensive for the organization, and offers four ways to put the team back together: a shared winning aspiration, forums for deciding together, smarter use of one-on-ones, and protected time to reconnect.
916. Getting better at AI isn't a technology problem. It's a work design problem. Drawing on a corporate "digital transformation" that never quite landed, Rachel Cooke explains why skill without structure has nothing to hold onto. She then walks through four questions that build that structure: what you're trying to win, whether your tools and guardrails match your expectations, where AI belongs in your highest-value work, and how your team learns together while the technology keeps changing.
914. How do you get ready for your year-end review? And should you be starting now? Most of us reduce our professional story to the obvious stuff – titles, job descriptions, the big projects – and lose the truest evidence of how we actually work. Borrowing a page from college-admissions expert Sara Harberson, Rachel walks through five moves to uncover your fuller professional story, with enough time for year-end.
913. When something's broken at work, we reach for the big fix — the reorg, the new tool, the strategy overhaul. But ask people to describe their perfect coffee and they'll say rich, dark, bold. Put a cup in front of them and they reach for weak and milky. Rachel Cooke applies that same gap to work, where what's holding you back usually isn't strategy. It's the thousand small snags you've stopped noticing. Here's how to find one and ease it from right where you sit.