Cindy and I first heard Carly Fiorina speak as part of a Live2Lead event we hosted in late 2018 then we were in a small group with her in Orlando, FL the following spring. I contacted her team after that event, which led to quite a bit of interaction with her over the next year. Carly was actually t...

I’ve often heard the deep philosophical question “If a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?” and thought it stupid. Quite frankly, I’d rank it right up there with the guy who closes himself in the refrigerator to see if the light really does go off whe...

Defining moments have a way of changing us.  When considering some of the defining moments in your own life I (Cindy) believe you would agree that we are never quite the same person after a defining moment.  We either move forward or backward - but we always move.

In Leadership Gold John puts it t...

So picture this… One of your most senior employees, the one who’s arguably the absolute best in the organization in their specific skill set, constantly grumbles about how poorly they’re treated and occasionally goes on a tirade slamming the owner in front of all of their peers. Because they have so...

Over the last several years, I’ve seen more and more references - through basically every media channel I pay any attention to with ties to the overall workforce - to the importance of soft skills. More often than not though, these references are generalizations tied to manager and executive level r...

Major changes can be defining moments for a company. Whether launching a new product, acquiring new customers, the arrival of competitors, countless circumstances can bring us to defining moments.  How the organization and its leaders respond or react can be a defining moment. Yes, this is more insi...

In Maxwell’s book, Leadership Gold, John reminds us that most days are similar to others and don’t really stand out in a big way. But there are some days that are unlike all the others.  These days, we find opportunities to take a stand when everyone is sitting or follow the crowd and hope things pa...

Once we’ve been intentional about providing each individual team member with that crystal clear understanding of how each specific task they’re responsible for ties back to our mission, vision, and even values, we should certainly be seeing them buy in at a higher level. But that’s not always as sim...

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 team to remain...

An article I found from Management-Issues.com opened with this, “Listen up, I will say this only once. Misunderstandings between workers and managers cost firms $37bn a year, yet few firms trouble to do anything about it.” Another article from the Society for Human Resource Management cited Debra Ha...

In a previous message on Defining Moments, Pivotal Decisions, I (Cindy) shared the importance of defining moments and how our decisions in the moment shape the future of our leadership.  

Let’s go deeper into the impact our character and values have on the outcome of those defining moments we’ll ha...

In all the years I worked in manufacturing, specifically with the various lean initiatives that were rolled out, one phrase I heard as often as any other was “What gets measured gets done.” At one point, I worked closely with one particular production supervisor to fabricate and assemble a few dozen...