Size (of the Stage) Doesn’t Matter!

Let’s go back to that less than engaging experience I mentioned before where a fellow not named Bret Michaels soured my opinion of every bit of music he and his band had put out during their entire career… He and his band released an EP and five full studio albums before 1983 &...

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Good Job! But Based on What?

As I think back to the nearly two decades I worked in a manufacturing facility, it seems like we measured everything! If you’ve ever been through an ISO-9000 audit, or whatever the number is now (it was TS-16949 in the automotive manufacturing world as recently as eight years ago), you know...

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Do the Benefits Outweigh the Costs?

Now that we’ve got a pretty firm grasp on What Onboarding Is & Why It Even Matters, at least with regards to the overall picture, let’s take a look at how effective onboarding can have a tangible impact on our bottom line before we even bother mapping out any specific steps we...

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Employees or Teammates?

Since we now have a definition of onboarding that we can work from, and I started pounding the drum about the importance of making sure our organizational values are a heavy part of that process, let’s start looking at a few things we need to keep in mind if we’re going to be...

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Our Actions Have to Answer These Questions!

When we’re intentional about delegation and openness, especially in a way that truly develops the strengths of each team member we lead, we’re well on our way to providing them with the answers they’re already asking to three very important questions. Without answering these...

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Nobody’s That Good By Themselves!

Two of the most important team leadership skills we need to create an atmosphere the people can be excited to be part of and actively engage in our organizational objectives are communication and emotional intelligence - but it doesn’t stop there! According to the Harvard Business School...

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Sweet Emotion? No, Managing Emotions!

We couldn’t argue the impact communication has as a team leadership skill if we really wanted to, but we’d need to be OK with being wrong! Since everyone I know who takes their leadership responsibilities serious doesn’t have time for such stuff, let’s push forward to what...

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Team Leadership Skills

To this point, we’ve dug into HOW teamwork really can make the dream work in our organizations and we looked at a few core competencies we’ll need to develop for effective team leadership. Now it’s time we really hash out exactly what skills we need to apply on a daily basis if...

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Are You “Countable”?

In The 17 Indispensable Laws of Teamwork, John Maxwell coined the idea of “countability” in chapter 9. He explains the Law of Countability by saying that “Teammates must be able to count on each other when it counts!” And if we ever want to be known as a bridge builder,...

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1,000 Bridges…

I closed last time with a less than stellar example of how influence, good or bad, can impact the overall direction of a team. And in that particular scenario I detailed, the person who had the influence and did more than his share of steering the ship carried no positional authority at all. If...

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Good or Bad, Teams Rally Around This…

If we were having this conversation face to face, I’m guessing you’d reply to what I shared last time by saying something like, “Alright Wes, if everything really does rise and fall on leadership, but you’re telling me it requires more than the carrot and stick status-quo,...

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Everything Rises and Falls On…

OK, so maybe teamwork can make the dream work with regards to helping drive profitability in our organizations… And maybe employee engagement and teamwork are directly correlated with one another… But how do these fairly fluffy ideas become reality and who’s responsible for...

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