After nearly two decades with the same company, and most of that in one facility, I knew just about everyone I worked with daily on a first name basis. I also knew many of their family members and a fair amount about what the majority of them enjoyed doing during the little bit of time they had...
While accepting similar positions with different companies wasn’t necessarily moving me toward a fulfilling purpose, working just nine or ten hours daily in those companies provided something I hadn’t experienced in years: time to pursue the things we had gotten that glimpse of...
When we’ve done the work to create the kind of atmosphere that great people want to be a part of, because they see the impact our organization makes and they have a desire to be involved in something that matters, and we’ve invested the necessary energy to have at least a foundational...
If we truly want to help our team members feel like they’re part of something that matters, developing solid relationships by connecting on common ground can provide a great foundation. This isn’t some theory I read in a book, it’s something I saw a few managers demonstrate and...
A Harvard Business Review article by former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly called How to Connect Employees to Your Company’s Purpose opened like this:
When I ask CEOs in the new CEO workshop we run at Harvard Business School to rate the importance of having and living a great corporate purpose...
Since I’ve shared a few things I learned from Jeff Henderson here already, this seems like a great time to include one more. First though, let me provide some perspective. I often talk with business owners and executives who have grown a bit weary after painting a picture of their...
To be able to put a little purpose behind the mission, vision, and values we want our teams to connect with and live out - or even be able to connect with them ourselves - it’s never as simple as reading words from a page. Let’s be honest, most companies have core values listed on...
Make no mistake, I’ve seen some incredibly eloquent verbiage used in defining companies’ missions, visions, and values. But I’ve rarely seen the people in an organization rally around all that eloquence in a way produces. Even when the results seem to match the mission and...
I want to challenge you to really churn through this mission statement for a deep understanding of all it captures:
“Our mission is to delight our customers as the number one technology driven global manufacturer and marketer of value differentiated XYZ products and services. We will...
When we’ve accepted the responsibility for leading, be that of a team under our authority or an organization made up of volunteers, having a crystal-clear definite purpose and understanding that we will always need to go beyond what’s expected to achieve it is a must! But to carry...
Having looked at the importance of putting our purpose to words and showing the impact a purpose can have on pushing through some of the tougher times we’ll face when we accept responsibility for leading - through a high level look at how my own purpose has changed and grown over the last...
I can’t remember exactly when I read The Master Key to Riches for the first time but I believe it was just over twenty years ago. Truth be told, it was so much to take in at that point that I recall having to go through each subsection of every chapter twice before moving on - just to begin...
