As I approached the one-year mark in my new role with that small, family-owned business, I received my first annual performance review. My immediate manager and the owners of the company were keenly aware of all I had taken on in that position as well as in my time away from work. They saw tremendou...
Accepting a position with a new organization after spending nearly my entire adult life with one company was a tremendous shift. The tasks I was responsible for on a daily basis were indeed similar to what I had been doing for years, but the industry and the team members I was serving were wildly di...
October 6, 2014 was my first day in a role with a new company since I was 19 years old. When the nail I had been laying on became uncomfortable enough, I had no choice but to develop a definite plan for making a change. Even then, though, definiteness of decision was what turned that plan into actio...
Years ago, I heard a story of a traveler stopping at a farmhouse along a country road to ask for directors. As the traveler spoke with the old man sitting on the front porch, he noticed that the dog laying beside him was constantly moaning, albeit quietly. The traveler asked the old man if there was...
The “demotion promotion” stung for sure, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the challenges we dealt with over the four or five years leading up to that. We had nurtured the seeds from each and were on much more stable ground, financially and emotionally. Truth be told, fending off foreclosure, reeling ...
Living through such an extended period of scarcity and digging our way out of that near-foreclosure experience certainly strengthened our resolve, but it also provided us with seeds we could nurture toward significantly greater opportunities later on. Those seeds served as a foundation for the confi...
Because we chose to take a moral stand and just were not willing to compromise our values, our financial opportunities tied to that multi-level marketing venture never really recovered. But digging in on what I knew was right provided more value than we would have ever gotten there; the seeds that v...
The cost of ostracism was real, financially and emotionally. In addition to all the private conversations painting us as the bad guys for taking a moral stand, the individual who actually told those ladies that he wouldn’t help them unless they slept with him got down right nasty about us in front o...
Just so it’s fresh in our minds, let’s revisit how Hill defined his third leadership attribute, a keen sense of justice. He shared that “Without a sense of fairness and justice, no leader can command and retain the respect of followers.” I’ve emphasized this in each of my books and with every group,...
In our initial conversation about the position, the one with global responsibility for our corporate-wide behavior-based safety initiative supporting around 80 facilities, Tim shared that the salary range was initially listed as $63K to $75k. He followed that statement by immediately saying he felt ...
After surviving the painful near-foreclosure experience, Cindy and I put our heads down with an intense focus on climbing out of the hole it put us in. Outside our full time jobs, we continued to put every ounce of energy we had into growing our multilevel marketing business. That provided plenty of...
Having to choose between surrender and survival forced me to channel all the self-control I could muster and engross myself into the details of a definite plan for climbing out of the hole we found ourselves in after that near-foreclosure experience. I mentioned receiving a whopping $16 check as par...
