While I was intentional about not mentioning either organization’s name before, I have no doubt that you had a very clear picture of the one with broken milkshake machines and the one serving God’s chicken sandwich. And you certainly weren’t alone! In cxtoday.com article called “McDonald’s Is Failin...

Let’s set any leadership responsibility we hold to the side briefly and think about how much an organization’s values - specifically, how each team member does or does not uphold those values - impacts our desire to do business with them. As regular Joe’s, clients or even just members of the communi...

A great team will definitely care about the core values we exemplify as we build the foundation for our organization, but that’s not where the importance of those values stops. How leaders, as well as each team member in an organization, live out those values will impact business relationships with ...

Throughout Leading With A Clear Purpose, I emphasized how important it is for everyone in a leadership role to understand exactly why they do what they do, to share a message with our teams detailing why our organization exists, and to help each team member understand their own purpose while connect...

For the casual observer, it could appear as though the results each of the businesses Craig and Kim have acquired are the primary reasons so many solid candidates have applied to join their team. After all, who doesn’t want to be part of a winning team? Where I’d challenge that casual observer, thou...

As I opened the second section of Leading With A Clear Purpose, I shared the story of my fondest Major League Baseball memory, the 2004 American League Championship Series where the Boston Red Sox narrowly avoided being swept and came back to win four straight games against the New York Yankees befo...

As I shared what I’ve observed personally over the last several years for what I believe is a textbook example of using core values as a foundation for an organization, I mentioned how I’ve seen Craig and Kim work to ensure every member of their team understands exactly what each value looks like in...

Make no mistake, providing behavioral examples that define our core values doesn’t have to be through some elaborate presentation for the world to see, or even done with a nifty slideshow in small groups. It’s far more important that we exemplify the appropriate behaviors personally and that we reco...

Highlighting our own behavior to provide examples that define our values certainly helps us build those values into the conversations we have with our teams, but don’t mistake this as a suggestion to be boastful about how amazing we are; it’s anything but that! 

Not long after starting our business...

We’ve looked at how things can go really wrong without strong organizational values in place and how easy it can be to fall short of providing a picture of those values for everyone on our teams. We’ve also dug into how, even with specific values listed in various places throughout our office, we ca...

Before we walk through a few steps we can take to remove every bit of ambiguity we possibly can from the core values our organization operates on, let’s tackle an issue every leader faces at one point or another: even when we detail exactly what “doing good” looks like for each of our team members, ...

I started my first full time job just after turning fifteen years old and, as they say, the rest is history… But that history makes for a good story every now and then! In this case, the story won’t be all that funny but it’s certainly relevant why it’s so important for us to remove the ambiguity th...