Strangely enough, my emphasis on addressing specific behaviors that are in direct conflict with expected performance standards often seem to be interpreted as insistence on throwing the proverbial baby out with that bathwater… Many supervisors, managers, or even casual readers of some of the work I ...

The best leaders I (Cindy) know have learned the Art of Leadership as much or more than the Science of Leadership. 

The Art of Leadership Learning is the intuitive piece of gaining the right skills to lead effectively.  It’s not the Science of Leadership, although that is important. It's the Art o...

Whether we can tie it directly to a profit & loss statement or not, the costs any organization incurs when no one is held accountable are significant. Quite honestly, those costs can be so high and can spread across so many areas of a business that it’s almost impossible to imagine leaders not recog...

Do you remember the story about Goldilocks and the Three Bears? I can’t exactly recall how she got into their house, or even why she was in the area to begin with, but I do remember that she was tired and needed a nap. In trying each bed in the place, she found that Papa Bear’s was too hard, Mama Be...

Not so long ago in our Leading At The Next Level program, I put together a lesson called Don’t Confuse Quiet Quitting with a Lack of Leadership. Not only did I emphasize that the idea of “quiet quitting” was far from being something new, I did my best to step on as many toes as I could by stating th...

If we really want to avoid the costs that pile up when no one is held accountable and capture the profitability that’s so often killed as a result, the first step is realizing there’s even a problem… Before you tune me out here, I’m not inviting you to an AA meeting! When there’s a leadership issue,...

In seeing how much profitability we can miss out on when we lose credibility and our team becomes less loyal, and those certainly aren’t the only issues we’ll see if we aren’t holding our team members accountable, one may ask why a leader would even consider allowing this to go on… I believe the ans...

Let’s consider what Shannon Howard shared right off the bat in Holding People Accountable: Where Most Leaders Fail once more:

When accountability is lacking, performance, company culture, and morale suffer. When employees are not held accountable for missed deadlines, bad behavior, or poor perfor...

In 2019, I (Cindy) hurt my back, which put me out of commission for around 2 weeks and months of pain afterward. Along with strengthening exercises, the best thing I could do involved (and still does) daily stretching. I’m not talking about those ‘just woke up from a nap’ stretch either.  The stretc...

OK leaders, I’m counting on you to have done the work to address the last profitability killer we looked at, The Cost of Confusion, by taking the steps to set clear expectations for your teams. Even with the most detailed explanation though, we’re not likely to see our team members meet or exceed th...

It’s our privilege and our responsibility as leaders to help our people become better. Holding a high standard to the core values of the organization is a great start.

The first step in turning team values into team performance is holding ourselves and our people accountable to our actions and atti...

Here’s what I can promise you; we can indeed eliminate the cost of confusion and avoid leaving a ton of profit on the table if we’re willing to provide the kind of clear expectations that produce results! I’m certainly not suggesting that this is easy but by following a few simple steps, we can remo...