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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Miserable Employees Aren’t Engaged…

When I mention making sure our team members can measure their performance, have a clear understanding of its relevance, and know their significance in the process, it doesn’t sound all that hard - and it’s not! But don’t mistake this simplicity for something that requires no...

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HR May Talk About It But Leaders EARN It

Think back to the comment I referenced a few times previously about this so-called “fuzzy initiative driven by someone in human resources that never yields tangible results”... The fellow who made that comment went on to explain that this was because “most CEOs continue to sit...

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How Effective Leadership Drives Employee Engagement

By this point, we should have a solid understanding of just how much profitability is being killed in our respective organizations by just an average number of employees who aren’t actively engaged. But knowing the issue exists and having a plan for addressing it are two VERY different...

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Not Just Some Fuzzy Initiative…

Based on the stats we just looked at showing that an overwhelming majority of the workplace at-large isn’t actively engaged in “powerfully rowing toward their company goals,” the cost of disengaged employees should be fairly evident… Truth be told, I struggle to...

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The Cost of Disengaged Employees

Once we’ve been intentional about creating a culture of top-down leadership that provides effective communication on an ongoing basis and we’ve worked to minimize the profitability that’s killed by high voluntary turnover and ongoing recruiting, the next - but certainly no less...

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The Proof is in the Pudding…

If we want to have any hope of capturing the profit that’s so often killed in the recruiting process and build a strong recruiting pipeline, we’ll definitely need intentional involvement from leadership at all levels of our organizations in order to cast of clear vision of where great...

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Developing a Strong Recruiting Pipeline

Any way we slice it, recruiting great candidates to join our team comes with a price tag! When we’re forced to recruit constantly because the business is growing, it’s hard enough - especially in a world where those great candidates are hard to come by… But if our voluntary...

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Being Involved From the Start...

I doubt it would be very difficult to choose which management team you would have preferred working for, the one where everybody knows your name or the one where NOBODY seemed to care if you had a name, especially if all the other factors involved were about the same… Quite frankly,...

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Where Everybody Knows Your Name...

If you’ve ever seen the 80s TV show Cheers you’re probably hearing the theme sound in your mind right now, wrapping up with the line “where everyone knows your name…” Whether it’s a friendly neighborhood basement bar in Boston, your favorite local restaurant...

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Breaking Tradition

We can certainly stick with the way it’s always been in our recruiting approach if we want, but I’ve only seen that kill more and more profitability over time. With such a drastic increase in minimum wage in a relatively short time, the “skilled trades shortage”...

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The Way It’s Always Been…

On January 2, 1996, I had an epiphany! While scraping ice off the 2x4 purlins before nailing down roofing metal for the poultry house I was helping build, I realized that I didn’t want to make a living as a carpenter for the rest of my life. Truth be told, I didn’t really want to do...

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