Good or Bad, Teams Rally Around This…

If we were having this conversation face to face, I’m guessing you’d reply to what I shared last time by saying something like, “Alright Wes, if everything really does rise and fall on leadership, but you’re telling me it requires more than the carrot and stick status-quo,...

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Everything Rises and Falls On…

OK, so maybe teamwork can make the dream work with regards to helping drive profitability in our organizations… And maybe employee engagement and teamwork are directly correlated with one another… But how do these fairly fluffy ideas become reality and who’s responsible for...

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Teamwork Makes the Dream Work… But How?

A few years back, I did a series of lessons in our Leading At The Next Level program combining some things that stuck out to me when I re-read John Maxwell’s book, The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork, with several experiences I had lived through in my own career since reading it for the...

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A Solid Framework to Build On

An article I recently read on the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) website titled In Search of Soft Skills: Why you should teach employees to be more resilient, communicative, and creative opened by stating “Being gifted at performing the technical aspects of a job can take an...

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What Do They Mean by “Soft Skills”?

In his Forbes.com article titled Here Are The Top 5 Soft Skills I Look For In Candidates, Mark Pena opens by saying, “In an automating workforce, soft skills are the irreplaceably human element of work - and the thing employers are desperate to find.”

I can’t count the number of...

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The Power of Collaboration

So last time we looked at why it’s important for someone in a leadership role to develop emotional intelligence... Whether that’s us in the role or it’s the leader we report to, not understanding what causes those highest emotional moments can drive quite the wedge between folks...

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Return On Investment

Had last week not been quite as packed as it was, we would have wrapped up this final response to Why is Effective Communication Important? and now be starting digging into Communication Skills in the Workplace. I could run through the list of craziness that’s packed the last 10 days or so...

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Soft Skills that Make a Hard Impact

I closed the last post by bringing up one of the biggest challenges I’ve seen organization’s struggle with in determining whether or not they make an investment into the new skills someone will need as they transition into a role with leadership responsibility. When we’re...

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It’s Not My Fault!?

Be it a job we didn’t get, a performance issue in our department, or we just busted our tail on a patch of ice in the parking lot, a fairly natural inclination is to look for someone we can assign the blame to. And in many cases, we’ve even built fancy processes to guide us in doing...

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Identify the Destination and Love the Journey

Through the last few posts and the LinkedIn article that set the tone for them, we’ve looked at some of the most pressing issues that cause so many of us to lock onto a goal and lose nearly all focus on anything but that goal. In many cases, that can suck the joy out of just about...

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Lean & Mean!

For almost all of the nearly 20 years I worked in manufacturing, I had at least some level of involvement with implementing the tools most commonly referred to as LEAN. Truth be told, at least ten of those years consisted of a high level of hands-on involvement where I worked directly with teams...

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The Real Thing!

Through the last several posts, we’ve looked at why it’s so important for us to Control What We Can Control, we’ve dug into What We Can Control, we’ve discussed how Our Attitude and Our Actions play a critical role in all this, and we discussed how You Can...

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