Just a few days ago, I contacted a relatively new local restaurant to confirm their current business hours prior to setting up an appointment with someone coming in from out of town. I completed the form on their website, hit submit, and received a message saying that I would receive feedback at the email address I provided shortly. More than 72 hour have passed and still no response…

I know it was a simple question with the answer likely already posted on their website, but I’ve seen several other places operating on different schedules than they had listed simply due to Covid. I also wanted to double check this since the person I’m meeting is coming from an hour away and the time we were looking at is right as the place shows it will open.

While whether they’re open or not isn’t a big deal, the point I’m calling attention to here is that their messaging said I’d receive a reply soon and that hasn’t happened…

So what does that...

I worked with teams across North America for more than a decade, providing them with practical tools that would help them interact with their coworkers in a way that could lead to changing behavior and reducing the risk of workplace injury. Where safety was involved, it nearly always boiled down to choosing between the harder right or the easier wrong… I’d love to take credit for that statement, but it was something I heard one of my mentors say literally hundreds of times as I worked with him. Putting on a pair of gloves or safety glasses always took just a little bit longer and added at least a small degree of discomfort versus not wearing them at all. Going through the proper steps of completely de-energizing the equipment (LockOut/TagOut) always required extra time…

While skipping those basic steps may seem crazy, the constant pressure (actual or perceived) of meeting productivity demands often led employees to choose the easier wrong! And if a metric on a...

I closed the last blog by referencing something I heard John Maxwell share recently, “Not investing in your team is short-cutting yourself as a leader,” then I challenged you to think about what tasks you’re still hanging onto that could really be passed on to someone on your team AND would serve to empower them in the process.

Once we begin delegating with the intention of developing the people around us, we need to also consider what tools could help those same people most to truly master those assignments we’re handing them. While it’s not quite across the board, most companies tend to have solid systems in place for helping team members improve their technical skills. Those hard skills, as we often call them, apply directly to the task at hand and typically have an immediate and visible impact on the final product we’re working to produce.

But the higher the level of responsibility for leading a team, the more we’ll find ourselves...

Originally shared in A Daily Dose Of Leadership on July 1, 2020.

Do you remember a time in your career, or even in your personal life, when so many people weren’t depending on you to make the right decisions? And maybe there wasn’t even anyone watching if you did something stupid, or something you wouldn’t have been proud to tell your grand kids about… Since smart phones have entered the equation, those days seem to be gone, huh…

I kinda remember those days… But I more clearly remember the day I volunteered to serve on a safety committee and learned that every move I made from that point forward would be under a microscope. The idea we touched on in the last message about Monkey See, Monkey Do would be hard at work in my life from that day forward. I couldn’t promote the importance of choosing safe behaviors and continue to do dumb stuff that could get me hurt if I wanted to earn any credibility at all! And as I accepted different roles...