How many times have you provided one of your team members with directions for completing a task you needed their help getting wrapped up by a certain time, only to get something far different from what you had hoped or miss the mark entirely? I’m sure we’ve all been on both ends of...

In March, April, and May of 1996, I received a tremendous amount of one-on-one training on how to operate the various pieces of equipment I was assigned to. Initially, someone else was responsible for swapping out the tooling and dies after each order I completed so the next part could be made....

I’ve never seen any organization’s executive team intentionally neglect living out their values, especially if they had a clear understanding of how much doing so could cost them! Whether it’s intentional or not, it happens more often than any of us likely realize. But how can...

As an organization, Enron had indeed identified their values:

Respect: We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don't belong here.

Integrity: We work with customers and prospects...

Before we dig into the challenges that come with “core values so generic that they could easily serve as fodder for a Dilbert cartoon,” and we’ll work through that in specific detail soon enough, we need to think about how that could ever be the case when “more than...

Over the course of my close to fifty years on this ball of mud, I’ve learned that the only people who truly like change are the ones who came up with the idea for the specific change that’s happening in any given moment. I can tolerate change when I have some level of control in how...

As we developed more clarity around the values of the clients we enjoyed working with the most, we found more and more opportunities to challenge them on how to tie those values to nearly every conversation they had with their teams. This didn’t require major changes in what they were...

I blocked my calendar on the afternoon for February 24, 2022 to roll out that new handbook for all the team members working with Craig and Kim. Having done similar roll-outs several times in the decade leading up to it, I had a picture in my mind of what to expect - and I dreaded it! While my...

Having been a few years since I handled all aspects of human resources for an organization on a daily basis, and never dealing with an ownership transition, I left that initial dinner meeting with a list of items I’d need to dig into prior to their upcoming acquisition date. As much as I...

I wrapped up Leading With A Clear Purpose by sharing how having our own extremely clear purpose helped us push through the Covid mandates that prevented us from capitalizing on the momentum we had built in our business going into 2020 and doing much billable work for anyone in the second half of...