Someone at any level of an organization can deteriorate our relationships with long term clients as well the community around them through behavior that isn’t congruent with their core values. And regardless of their primary focus being on the people involved or the task at hand, those clients and c...

Highlighting our own behavior to provide examples that define our values certainly helps us build those values into the conversations we have with our teams, but don’t mistake this as a suggestion to be boastful about how amazing we are; it’s anything but that! 

Not long after starting our business...

We’ve looked at how things can go really wrong without strong organizational values in place and how easy it can be to fall short of providing a picture of those values for everyone on our teams. We’ve also dug into how, even with specific values listed in various places throughout our office, we ca...

As Cindy and I worked to learn and understand what each member of our Executive Leadership Elite Think Tank had as core values for their organizations, we had intense conversations with all of them regarding how they kept those values in front of their teams; how often and in what setting did they c...

Once you have a solid understanding of how to apply the DISC Model of Human Behavior for immediately improving in each of the four components of emotional intelligence - self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management - I’m confident that you’ll be able to identify you...

Earlier, as I emphasized that even the most powerful organizational or individual purpose won’t completely replace the need for equitable compensation, I shared that we can’t communicate with all of our team members the same way and expect the same results, suggesting the idea of applying The Platin...

Leading with a clear purpose really does start with us, and coming to grips with how we’re wired can make an immediate difference in developing the kind of emotional intelligence that allows us to be so much more effective in how we do that. At the risk of being overly redundant (see what I did ther...

If empowering our team members requires a significant change in our approach, as compared to what they’re used to seeing from us, we’ll likely receive some curious looks and even some resistance - at least at first. We recently heard an example detailing exactly that as we kicked off the second sess...

Once we’ve been intentional about adjusting the pace we use to help each of our team members latch onto a purpose that drives them and yields engagement, we can shift our attention to the second piece of the pattern that Marston identified; is our team member more focused on the task at hand or the ...

Verbalizing a specific purpose that each of our team members identify and connect with can play a critical role in earning that 57% increase in discretionary effort that I referred to throughout What’s KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!) and several times as we’ve looked a...

As we work to verbalize a purpose each of our team members find fulfillment in and connect with, something they can rally around as a genuine purpose in their life, it won’t be as simple as throwing the proverbial mud against the wall and hoping something sticks. This will require us to be very spec...

Please don’t mistake me referring to something as being simple for thinking that I’m saying it will be easy. Even when we’ve invested the time to listen to what our team members are telling us and we’ve paid close attention to what their behaviors are showing us, we’ll still need to be incredibly in...