If we’re going to earn the kind of buy-in that yields the 57 percent increase in discretionary effort and 20 percent improvement in individual performance detailed in the Harvard Business Review article I referenced multiple times throughout What’s Killing Your Profitability?,...
If we’re going to lead with a clear purpose, providing the oh-so-necessary clarity for the team members who are counting on us, having a firm grasp on a purpose of our own that truly is rewarding can be the difference maker when we need to push through the tough times - and there will most...
Any time I’m talking with a business owner, an executive, or really anyone with responsibility for attracting and retaining great team members, I share a critical lesson I learned early on during my time working in behavior based safety: people rarely shy away from tasks due difficulty,...
If you really think about the challenge my friend shared with me in running one of his businesses, I’m betting you can relate! To that end, I think it’s safe to assume we’ve all felt that way at some point regardless of the role we’re in. In chapter eight of What’s...
During a phone call with a lifelong friend, I heard one of the most unique combinations of passion and despair that I can remember. He shared how he felt like he was just going through the motions in one aspect of his professional life, grinding his teeth through each project he completed, but...
Leaders offer growth and development options because they want the best for their people. As leaders, we have a responsibility to build our people and the way our people are built shows up in our culture every day. If we build values of service, integrity, accountability, responsibility, this...
Even when we’re extremely proactive in our leadership roles about being engaged with our teams, there’s more we can do to develop a strong recruiting pipeline! Being directly involved in the recruiting process certainly helps, as does having a consistent presence with on our teams,...
If we’re serious about giving our best team members a solid reason to stay by providing them with purpose and we’ve invested the energy into understanding the reasons that drive their behavior, we should certainly have a solid foundation. But when we can connect all of that to how...
Even when we begin to recognize what’s killing our profitability, start to dial in on the right prescription for addressing it, and come up with some simple solutions that can have a strong impact, we’ll miss capturing a significant amount of our best potential results if we allow our...
No, not the 1991 single by Extreme! I’m talking about what you and I need to provide to set the tone in our organizations - especially since we’re far more likely to get what we are then just what we want!
Whether they’re listed in the employee handbook, on a document in a...
We’ll soon start working through the tangible benefits an organization can expect from an effective employee orientation program but before we go too far into the HOW, we have to nail down the WHO and the WHY! Otherwise, any steps we take won’t likely make the impact we’re...
Christopher Columbus supposedly said “You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” I say supposedly because variations of that quote seem to be attributed to at least half a dozen folks, not the least of whom were Winston Churchill and William...
