Passing on the Knowledge

As we looked at the cost of a poor promotion, I shared some stories with you about a few different rockstar employees I had worked with over the years. One of them had been an assembly line lead for close to four decades but absolutely refused to even consider taking the next step into a...

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Balancing Tough Conversations

Even when the message is crystal-clear, there are gonna be times where team members fall short of our expectations. And while this won’t likely ever happen when we have an abundance of time to push all our other responsibilities aside to deal with it, a significant part of maintaining the...

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We Can’t Blame HR for Everything…

Early on in this process we looked at two separate profitability killers that nearly always feed off of each other and contribute to just about every metric a company tracks; the cost of high turnover and the cost of constant recruiting. In far too many cases, the responsibility for each of these...

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Learning From Loss to Lead Better

I (Cindy) don’t know a successful person that hasn’t learned from their losses in order to come back better than before.

It took Thomas Edison 10,000 attempts to perfect the light bulb.  Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper job for lacking creativity.  Michael Jordan was...

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Expansive Leader Development, Driving Engagement!

Whether there’s an exemplary top-down approach throughout the organization we’re a part of or not, each of us will be able to achieve better results within our own areas of leadership responsibility when we earn genuine buy-in from the team reporting to us! This particular thing, as...

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A Top-Down Leadership Approach

If the owners or executives in any organization want to have the best shot possible at improving profitability by building better leaders, they will need to be just as engaged in developing their own leadership and communication skills as they are in providing any kind of resource to the key...

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Improving YOUR Profitability By Building Better Leaders

I want to circle back to what I shared with you as we began this look at What’s Killing Your Profitability

“Organizations of all sizes invest significant amounts of time, money, and energy on improving their processes with hopes of becoming more profitable. Sometimes this is...

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We Can’t Do It On Our Own!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned with absolute certainty over the last thirty years in the workforce, having at least some level of leadership responsibility for the vast majority of that time, it’s that none of us can accomplish all we need to on our own. Whether we’re...

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Three Ways We Can Answer…

I believe the most vivid memory I have of someone in a leadership role answering cries for help was that of President George W. Bush at Ground Zero just days after 9/11. As he was addressing the crowd, someone yelled that they couldn't hear him and he responded, “I can hear you. I can hear...

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Answering the Cry for Help

Make no mistake, knowing what our team members are looking for from us is not terribly complicated! They will definitely make a point of telling us. That will generally (but not always) be direct and/or verbal early in our process of working to earn leadership with them, but it will get harder...

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The Impact of Leadership

In so much of what we’ve worked through in addressing each of the profitability killers to this point, I’ve referenced studies listing facts and data emphasizing the specific impact each one has on our bottom line. As much as I want to do that again here, contrasting the overall...

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They May Stop Asking…

If you think back to one of the first things I called your attention to in this process of addressing these profitability killers, one of the things we covered as we looked at how it all starts at the top - or at least the best returns can be captured when that’s the case - was the...

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