Learning that it took ten full years to make a change within Chick-fil-A that, al least from the outside looking in, seemed like something fairly simple, I’m guessing you’re on the same page with me as to why we cannot expect to say anything just once and get our entire team on the same page with us...
One communication issue I’ve seen kill profitability as much as any other ties directly back to the illusion George Bernard Shaw referenced; we can’t assume we’ve gotten our message across just because we shared it once!
Have you ever heard someone say, “I’m only gonna say this one time!”? Here’s a...
If we’re serious enough about capturing our best return to invest the energy into building a leadership culture that starts from the top and cascades throughout our organization, we’ll have a solid start toward achieving quantifiable results in addressing our profitability killers! And when we do, w...
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...
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...
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...
As I emphasized before, I’ve never met someone with any real level of leadership responsibility who didn’t have far more things on their to-do list than they had time for in a given day. That seems to be a given if we’re going to wear a leadership hat - or maybe it should be a cape… The secret sauce...
With a clear picture in your mind of someone you know who always says “I’ll get back to you on that” but rarely does, and a firm understanding for the importance of being responsive as a leader, let’s consider one of the biggest challenges I hear from folks with leadership responsibility when presse...
I’ll say it again, we don’t necessarily need to have every answer but we do need to respond! If we’re not willing to at least acknowledge the questions, issues, or even outreach of the folks on our teams, should we really expect them to consider us as their leaders? This is where I believe proactive...
One of the most valuable things Cindy and I have been able to do through our Emerging Leader Development program has been reading the immediate action steps that participants detail following each lesson. Seeing how individuals with varying levels of leadership responsibility absorb then apply what ...
