(RALEIGH, NC) TM Solutions, a human resources consulting organization that specializes in providing best practice consultation and customized talent management solutions, announces the launch of its newest innovation in talent development software application, Virtual Performance Coaching with Mobile Manager Feedback.

The Raleigh, NC-based company’s Mobile Manager software service, launched in April 2012, unifies its suite of talent management solutions for business on a single online platform designed for today’s managers.  The Mobile Manager unifies TMSelect, the firm’s state-of-the-art talent management process, with training and development workshops to help managers and their employees achieve better results in the workplace. In addition, companies utilize the Mobile Manager with robust management and team-building tools exclusive to TM Solutions, such as the company’s Talent Card and Peer Card.

In response to commercial demand for more applications of the Mobile Manager suite, TM Solutions has launched an integrated platform for ongoing coaching, development and feedback, Virtual Performance Coaching with Mobile Manager Feedback. The new application expands the Mobile Manager’s capabilities, giving users greater levels of success in reaching their business goals through development plans, strategies for process and personal effectiveness improvement, and, just as importantly, providing a communication framework to generate dialogue among executives, managers, and team members across multiple departments and silos within companies.

As with any TM Solutions offering, the development and release of Virtual Performance Coaching with Mobile Manager Feedback is a timely response to the demands that companies face in a fast-changing business climate, according to the company’s president, Rob Pulley. “We took our inspiration for the Mobile Manager itself from market changes, speed of technology, and the “do-more-with-less” requirements that have posed multiple challenges to modern business,” stated Pulley. “Our services, whether they are workshops, leadership development, or as with the Mobile Manager and Virtual Performance Coaching, software applications, aim to meet the modern business paradigm shift head-on, equipping our clients with a set of solutions that marry the best tools with the best practices.”

Pulley believes that the new set of tools embodied in Virtual Performance Coaching with Mobile Manager Feedback will help people make quicker, better decisions, enabling them to make performance coaching their highest priority in driving business performance. “We’ve integrated 100 different strategies, delivering feedback for a variety of scenarios people face every day, on topics ranging from personal effectiveness, leadership, and career development to interpersonal communications, relationships, and influence-building,” stated Pulley.

For more information on Virtual Performance Coaching with Mobile Manager Feedback, visit the TM Solutions site at http://www.tms-hr.com/Virtual-Performance-Coaching.aspx.


About TM Solutions

TM Solutions, LLC, founded in 2004, is an HR consulting organization that specializes in providing best practice consultation and customized talent management solutions.  Combining TMS Online, HR Store, TMSelect, Mobile Manager and Leadership Workshops with TMS OnDemand consultation services, TM Solutions helps clients attract and retain top talent while minimizing risk and reducing cost.  Innovative companies in North Carolina’s Research Triangle region turn to TM Solutions for talent management needs.

Media Contact

Rob Pulley, President

Phone:   (919) 325-1583

Email:  robpulley@tms-hr.com

We’re proud to announce our latest innovation to meet the needs of cutting-edge businesses.  Many emerging companies are completely virtual in their presence, abandoning the traditional office completely, while others utilize virtual tools on a regular basis to link teams spread across multiple locations in different cities, states, and even other countries around the world.

The Emergence of Tools Geared to Virtual Management and the TM Solutions Answer

Many of the tools developed to meet these virtual needs have centered on communications (Skype, for example) and project management (think: Basecamp).  While these tools have certainly enabled companies to perform the most basic business tasks, and even more complex ones, without a lingering thought to gathering in person, TM Solutions has chosen to be an innovator in addressing the multiple needs that these companies have for properly managing people and teams.  Furthermore these companies have an even greater challenge, in many cases, in generating a true corporate culture—something we believe is an ongoing process of developing leaders, managers, and teams, rather than just posting a set of corporate values and having a robust orientation session.

With these considerations in mind, we released our breakthrough talent management software, the Mobile Manager earlier this year.  Integrated with tools like our exclusive Talent Card and Peer Card, the Mobile Manager makes life easier for all managers and team members by connecting them to the information they need to know in order to collaborate and achieve business goals with greater effectiveness.  Through the Mobile Manager, people understand each other’s communication preferences, likes and dislikes, sensitivities and hot buttons, building credibility and trust across the organization.  People can also predict and act upon how others respond to various personal and leadership styles, both positively and negatively, as well as how they approach problem-solving tasks and react in pressured or deadline-oriented situations.

Since its release in April 2012, the Mobile Manager has made a huge impact on the team-building activities at participating companies.  We’ve received very positive feedback on the many elements that our clients find both easy to use and practical in their day-to-day leadership and collaboration roles.  They’ve also let us know that, like many other tools they find effective, they tend to see the Mobile Manager as their go-to resource for managing their teams—in effect, they spend a significant portion of each day and week “living” inside the platform, utilizing the Mobile Manager to leave them prepared for most of the challenges they face in working together with others.

Companies Oriented to Talent Management Need More

We are pleased to say that they have been asking for more. Organizations today recognize that managing profitability and maximizing productivity, as well as improving expertise and capabilities, is contingent on a sensible investment in their current talent and future leaders. In addition to organizational benefits they have seen with the Mobile Manager, managers and employees want coaching to help them deliver better results and achieve their personal goals. Employees and managers want access to relevant performance coaching as they need it and when they need it.

Thus, our clients want to broaden the scope of how they use the Mobile Manager, and we’ve responded with Virtual Performance Coaching with Mobile Manager Feedback.  This latest improvement takes the Mobile Manager to a new level of effectiveness, as it now serves as a preparation tool and communications tool for managers and teams to develop their talents and skills with interpersonal, developmental communications along the way.

Why Talent Management Processes and Tools Are Important

Most organizations adequately manage performance.  They set performance objectives, define key metrics, and conduct periodic assessments (monthly, quarterly, and/or annually).  What's missing is called the "performance gap."  

The performance gap is the time between the planning and assessment phases - the time where teams and individuals are actually doing their work, developing products, engaging customers, collaborating on teams, managing projects and programs, delivering products and services.  What type of ongoing, practical and timely performance feedback is actually taking place beyond the discussion of metrics, weekly staff meetings, and formal assessments?  Performance feedback, such as how to improve production and results, the quality of work, productivity, relationships, cross-functional collaboration, is, unfortunately, an area where most organizations place little to no focus. 

Today, it is possible to move beyond senior level coaching, as well as close the performance gap, by providing cost-effective, timely Virtual Performance Coaching with Mobile Manager Feedback (MMF) to all employees. Through this integration of technology, tools, and best practices in talent management, we can now deliver hundreds of high-quality coaching sessions to any employee—exactly when they need it.

Most companies, both big and small, simply cannot deliver on-demand performance coaching in-house to their managers and teams, due to issues around bandwidth, expertise, and cost.  Furthermore, individual managers have the same challenges around capacity and know-how, as well as the fact that many of them are elevated functional experts, rather than performance coaches. 

Real Business World Application—Not Just Another Piece of Technology

No matter the challenge, be it capacity, priority, expertise, or cost, companies can meet their objectives in talent management when they have the right tools for success.  That’s where Virtual Performance Coaching with Mobile Manager Feedback (MMF) comes into the equation, equipping executives, managers, and team members for multiple scenarios:

1.       You or your support group (manager, mentor, coach, HR rep, etc.) has identified a development need and you want to identify possible causes for the deficiency.

2.       You are coaching someone and want some ideas on how they can improve their personal effectiveness (production, quality of work, and productivity), communication, interpersonal skills, or leadership.

3.       You are conducting a performance review discussion with an employee and want some suggestions, talking points or strategies.

4.       You received some general feedback from others and want something more specific and targeted. You want to identify the “real need.”

5.       You are creating a development action plan for yourself or team member and want to do more than attend a webinar or workshop.

Virtual Performance Coaching with MMF offers high impact coaching content and strategies spanning 100 MMF options in four categories – personal effectiveness, career development (for current and future roles), leadership, and interpersonal skills (communication, relationships, influence).  MMF is ongoing, practical and timely performance feedback such as how to maximize production and results, improve the quality of work, increase productivity, or strengthen relationships and teamwork for self or team member. Each MMF provides objective and unbiased feedback that is personalized and relevant for each employee. 

Taking this holistic approach, Virtual Performance Coaching  helps companies develop the complete employee—molding better leaders, people who are better prepared to meet current and future organizational and market challenges. For more information on Virtual Performance Coaching with Mobile Manager Feedback, visit the TM Solutions site at http://www.tms-hr.com/Virtual-Performance-Coaching.aspx.  To discover a wide range of feedback options, visit http://www.tms-hr.com/Mobile-Manager-Feedback.aspx

TM Solutions created the Mobile Manager with the demands placed on today’s manager in mind.  Our new software tool combines multiple elements needed by today’s managers in order for them to execute on multiple fronts.  This multi-channel understanding of managers’ needs matches our own understanding that managers must play multiple roles in executing corporate strategy in the following areas:  leadership, coaching, collaborating, and team-building,

We’ve created the Mobile Manager as a one-stop hub for companies to leverage all of TM Solutions’ coaching, training, and development offerings in a user-friendly space optimized for desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, since we know that many managers must interact with remote employees or simply need these devices with them at all times to deal with the high speed of business opportunities these days.

Within this hub, we’ve built several core components to help managers execute in the field. First, managers have with them at all times a dashboard organizational view of all of the people within their chain of command and company work groups. Within this dashboard, managers can link to two important tools, Talent Cards and Peer Cards, for each person they interact with, take orders from, or manage on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Talent Cards and Peer Cards play a vital role in helping managers execute in the field.  Quickly-accessible Talent Cards help managers understand their employees and provide a predictive model for how they will react in certain situations, whether it’s a high pressure environment or a fun team challenge. Managers will have the psychometric foundation, via the Talent Card, to understand their employees’ motivations and get a quick refresher on each employee’s preferences, sensitivities and hot buttons, both in terms of their work-related values and interests and any relevant personal information that feeds into the greater understanding of that employee as a person.

The Mobile Manager exploits the genius behind Peer Cards in much the same way.  Many organizations call upon their management groups to collaborate on initiatives that they can then roll out within their own respective silos.  Sometimes these groups can come from the same function—as with regional managers at financial services companies—or they can be cross-functional,  as with government task forces represented by leaders from multiple agencies.  Regardless of function, in order to execute in collaborative situations, managers need to build understanding of their colleagues.  And often, due to the speed of opportunity or the urgency of the challenge they are asked to address, this understanding must be built quickly, and the Peer Card is there to do it.

With a perspective geared less for management and more for collaboration, managers can work together and execute corporate strategy through understanding their colleagues’ communication preferences, interpersonal expectations, strengths, and motivations through the Peer Card.

The Mobile Manager also incorporates other tools and services to enhance leadership and coaching as execution areas for managers.  TM Solutions has delivered live (as well as recorded) learning sessions through topical webinars aimed at areas such as engaging teams through effective leadership and communicating effectively. 

In addition to highly interactive content that sparks immediate new execution abilities based on coachable areas, TM Solutions has also brought into the Mobile Manager its extensive library of training and development content, from best practice solutions to leadership coaching and talent assessment knowledge bases.  As you can see, TM Solutions has quite literally tried to think of any challenge that managers can face in the field and optimize the answers to these challenges through vital technology made for today’s mobile, fast-paced setting.

When you want your people to execute the plan, you leave them no excuse for failure. You want them to have every platform to succeed, and the Mobile Manager can be that platform to drive organizational and individual success.

In last week’s installment, we discussed a couple of key benefits of TM Solutions’ Mobile Manager for organizations, becoming an employer of choice and driving employee engagement and accountability. This week, we’ll discuss how the Mobile Manager aids organizations in building high-performance teams and strengthening leadership teams.

Building high-performance teams is critical to today’s challenging business environment.  Businesses achieving the highest level of market success are doing so with more horizontal, team-focused environments, versus the old model of vertical management.

Companies need high-performing teams in every aspect of their businesses. While many companies were early to embrace the team concept in sales via producer-manager roles, many still have not embraced the team concept in totality.  Product development teams have the ability to exponentially achieve greater innovation than siloed gurus, and operational teams have the ability to tackle problems at any scope.  It’s been proven, time and again, that corporate executive teams out-perform companies full of yes-men and women moving orders from the top down the management chain. What works for the military, in this case, doesn’t necessarily translate into the business world.

Key to the team-building concept is the breakthrough innovation of the Peer Card, one of the main drivers of the Mobile Manager.  While many companies try to paint full pictures of their employees to promote management’s understanding, few have embraced the revolutionary concept of peer-to-peer engagement embodied in the Peer Card.

With the Peer Card, employees see the strengths and development areas of the people with whom they must execute their respective business plans each and every day. With an engaged and accountable group of people, the Peer Card is an incredible driver of success. Each employee knows how the other is motivated, approaches problems, tends to work within a group, and other key values and interests that drive individual measures of success and worth.

In today’s business environment, companies can see real return-on-investment not only in individual talent management, but also in strengthening leadership teams. Forty-one (41) per cent of a company’s profitability—managing revenues, expenses, and efficiency—comes from its frontline leaders.  So how do companies tackle strengthening leadership teams?

Many companies have embraced educational opportunities for their leaders, such as offering executive management training in-house or through a third party and they have done so with varying levels of success.  While these offerings seem like a great fit, companies often find their leaders fleeing for greener pastures because of a built-in recipe for failure—placing leadership engagement in the hands of a corporate or outside entity.

This isn’t to say that paying for your employees to obtain executive education is a bad concept; to the contrary, these can be very successful strategies to build leaders in the company.  What’s neglected in this strategy can be addressed in the same manner that companies utilize the Mobile Manager with employees within high-performing teams.

What strengthens leadership is the actual practice of leading.  Too many managers are left to simply “manage to the numbers” or to existing performance management templates. The Mobile Manager turns this old concept on its head by immersing managers in the practice of leading.

The Mobile Manager dictates a systematic approach, so that managers can be a part of their teams’ performance, within sales campaigns, innovation initiatives, and problem-solving for internal needs or for customers.  Talent Cards help them with managing their direct reports, while Peer Cards assist them with understanding and strengthening their relationships with other leaders in the company.  Ongoing training and education never leaves managers waiting for that next course of action in their own development.

The launch of the Mobile Manager from TM Solutions is ushering in a new wave of resources for companies searching for a new way forward in managing their businesses for growth and opportunity in the marketplace.

One of the cornerstones of running a smart organization, primed to turn marketplace challenges into business opportunities, is talent management.  There are four key points to talent management:

·         Becoming an Employer of Choice

·         Driving Engagement and Accountability

·         Building High-Performance Teams

·         Strengthening Your Leadership Teams

While there are many potential employees in most markets, businesses want to become an employer of choice.  What does this mean?  In most cases, top performers are on somebody’s radar—headhunters, corporate recruiters, and skilled human resources executives are always looking out for the people who will come into an organization and drive growth and sustainability, whether their talents lie in business development, management, or operations.

Becoming an employer of choice means that these top performers will remain loyal to your organization, rather than playing the market to hear what others have to offer, whether it’s better compensation, more responsibility, or new challenges.  To become an employer of choice, you must earn your employees’ loyalty, just as you do with your customers. 

Companies have systems in place for sales, customer service, and operations to retain customers, and the Mobile Manager puts this same systematic approach in place for talent management.  The Mobile Manager unifies Talent Cards (tools for manager/employee development and engagement), Peer Cards (tools for building understanding among team members), along with training and education.

Management teams must also seek new and different ways to drive employee engagement and accountability. What we mean here by engagement is that companies must fearlessly walk a two-way street.  Leadership must ensure that they know what their employees are thinking with regard to their own roles within the company, and what they think about their leaders and the company itself.

By accountability, we mean that employees will take full responsibility in their own efforts and those of the teams within which they perform.  In order to take responsibility, and thus, accountability, employees simply can’t match up to an original job description or an annual review. The needs of businesses evolve on a daily basis in these fast times we live in, and these business needs demand more of managers, from a continuous improvement and dialogue perspective, on how they motivate and communicate with their teams.

To facilitate ongoing dialogue to drive evolving business needs, the Mobile Manager offers ongoing training and education to shore up development areas for employees. In addition, the Mobile Manager places a premium on being able to understand employees and how they will perform in various situations and environments that reflect the reality of fast-evolving business. Built on a platform that recognizes each employee as an individual to be developed for future leadership, the Mobile Manager is ideally-suited to companies on the move.

When employees are engaged, they will bring their best ideas to the table in every situation possible. When employees are accountable, they will drive their efforts to bring their ideas and those of others to bear on the success of the company.

In next week's installment, we will discuss building high-performance teams and strengthening your leadership teams.