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...
In the final lesson of our Emerging Leader Development course, Cindy opens by challenging participants to consider the real driver behind why they’ve accepted leadership responsibility. She goes on to compare things like power, position, money, and prestige with influence, growth, opportunities, and...
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...
From nearly the beginning of this look at how values serve as a foundation for any organization, I’ve stressed the critical role habits play in everything we do. I introduced the idea of helping our team members connect their behavior to core company values by sharing that it would require a slight ...
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...
As I shared in the next to last chapter of Leading With A Clear Purpose, the compliance side of human resources absolutely drains the life out of me. And putting together an employee handbook, ones where values are often listed in the first few pages but have little relevance to anything else afterw...
To have a real shot of our core company values creating the legacy we hope for, the expectations we set must be sustainable. Realistically, though, we wouldn’t place unstainable expectations on anyone we truly care about - and that should cover everyone we’ve earned influence who’s following us, reg...
