While Terry Francona was the manager of the Boston Red Sox during the late season collapse in 2011, and he contract option wasn’t renewed afterward, I’m not placing the blame exclusively on him. Quite frankly, I thought John Lackey was a goon long before that. And while Francona held the “manager” t...
Building a successful culture that perpetuates based on our foundational core values will indeed be one that produces wins for everyone involved, but winning won’t be the sole motivation for the great people we attract to our team through this process. High standards, consistently exceeding expectat...
In The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, John Maxwell emphasizes that “growth compounds and accelerates IF we remain intentional about it.” Compounding interest, in growth or in our finances, can work for or against it. If you’re not completely certain this is true, have your banker run some numbers sho...
While under what was likely the most intense pressure I had ever experienced to fill open positions, I remember a conversation with one of the managers I was supporting where he told me that he needed seven people with a very specific skill set by the following week. It just so happened that I had a...
In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxwell explains The Law of the Mirror by simply saying “We attract who we are, not who we want.” I had never seen a more obvious example than the organization I just referenced; initially as I became familiar with the company and even more so as the su...
Make no mistake, turnover is always going to happen. Part of our responsibility as leaders is to plan for that. And in planning for each type of turnover we’re sure to experience at one point or another - be that a retirement, a termination due to unacceptable performance, or someone leaving for a c...
To sustain the effort required by our high expectations, accountability must be built into our culture - at all levels. But detailing what our team members need to do and how that needs to happen is only part of that process. Even the most ingrained habits supporting the simplest behaviors can still...
Creating a legacy through our core values requires us to set clear (and high) expectations for our team members. Maintaining accountability, consistently and across the board, around the behaviors that model those values is an absolute necessity for ever sustaining those expectations. But accountabi...
I remember a time very early in my behavior-based safety career when Terry Ward (who I’ve mentioned several times in this look at values and throughout my first two books), stopped by my office to chat about something. When he stepped in, I had an email pulled up from Cindy. I can’t recall what the ...
Building consistent team behavior that’s based on our core company values will require removing any possible variance around what each value looks like in practice - in each individual role. But having a clear understanding of the necessary behaviors is just part of the process. It will take at leas...
Society has countless “influencers” with significant followings. Having a high number of folks watch their foolishness online is wildly different from the responsibility leaders hold when they’ve earned genuine influence with the people on their teams, or for that matter, anyone their behavior impac...
Even in cases where we leave absolutely nothing to chance, taking every single opportunity we have to provide examples showing how each of our core values can be acted on in roles our team members perform daily, we’ll still need to provide consistent reinforcement backing our consistent example. As ...
