One of the first people I remember meeting on an assembly line, when I finally made it to the shop floor after nine full days of orientation, was a fellow named Phil. He was the day shift lead on that line and had been for long enough to have earned a reputation that even a hard headed and strong...

An article from Forbes.com called Promoting Wrong People Hurts Employee Retention and Productivity opens by stating “Managers are key to employee retention and productivity. But many companies don’t promote into management the people who would do the best job as managers.” ...

I’ll say it one last time as we close this look at capturing the profitability that’s killed when no one is held accountable: accountability isn’t all about cracking the ole whip! In fact, the most effective leaders I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with or even...

Strangely enough, my emphasis on addressing specific behaviors that are in direct conflict with expected performance standards often seem to be interpreted as insistence on throwing the proverbial baby out with that bathwater… Many supervisors, managers, or even casual readers of some of...

Whether we can tie it directly to a profit & loss statement or not, the costs any organization incurs when no one is held accountable are significant. Quite honestly, those costs can be so high and can spread across so many areas of a business that it’s almost impossible to imagine...

Do you remember the story about Goldilocks and the Three Bears? I can’t exactly recall how she got into their house, or even why she was in the area to begin with, but I do remember that she was tired and needed a nap. In trying each bed in the place, she found that Papa Bear’s was...

Not so long ago in our Leading At The Next Level program, I put together a lesson called Don’t Confuse Quiet Quitting with a Lack of Leadership. Not only did I emphasize that the idea of “quiet quitting” was far from being something new, I did my best to step on as many toes as...

If we really want to avoid the costs that pile up when no one is held accountable and capture the profitability that’s so often killed as a result, the first step is realizing there’s even a problem… Before you tune me out here, I’m not inviting you to an AA meeting! When...

In seeing how much profitability we can miss out on when we lose credibility and our team becomes less loyal, and those certainly aren’t the only issues we’ll see if we aren’t holding our team members accountable, one may ask why a leader would even consider allowing this to go...

Let’s consider what Shannon Howard shared right off the bat in Holding People Accountable: Where Most Leaders Fail once more:

When accountability is lacking, performance, company culture, and morale suffer. When employees are not held accountable for missed deadlines, bad behavior, or poor...

OK leaders, I’m counting on you to have done the work to address the last profitability killer we looked at, The Cost of Confusion, by taking the steps to set clear expectations for your teams. Even with the most detailed explanation though, we’re not likely to see our team members...

Here’s what I can promise you; we can indeed eliminate the cost of confusion and avoid leaving a ton of profit on the table if we’re willing to provide the kind of clear expectations that produce results! I’m certainly not suggesting that this is easy but by following a few...