Improving YOUR Profitability By Building Better Leaders

I want to circle back to what I shared with you as we began this look at What’s Killing Your Profitability…

“Organizations of all sizes invest significant amounts of time, money, and energy on improving their processes with hopes of becoming more profitable. Sometimes this is based on a goal of becoming best-in-class but sometimes it is just to stay competitive with customers or in attracting talent. All too often though, the things that can have the most immediate impact on profitability (as well as the lives of everyone involved) are overlooked or completely written off because those things are considered to be intangible… What are those things? Those are the skills needed to build an organizational culture that produces world class results and make the best people in your respective industry beg to be part of your team! Those skills tie back to a word that’s frequently misused; leadership…”

Just in case I haven’t been clear enough through this process of addressing each of the issues I’ve seen be responsible for killing so much profitability in every single industry we’ve dealt with, I’ll stress once more how much of that lost profitability can indeed be captured by building better leaders! That said, this is not and cannot be done by poking the issue with a stick. I’ve seen far too many organizations attempt to pull a deck of slides from the internet, read it as quickly as they can to their supervisors and managers before going through the rest of their canned message in the quarterly meeting, and call it done. That’s not how any reasonable person would approach learning something we consider a hard skill so why in the world would anyone think it could possibly build a better leader?

Truth be told, I don’t think that even the ones who take that approach expect it to work… I’m also convinced that most of them don’t understand the real impact each of the profitability killers we’ve looked at can have on the bottom line, how to effectively measure them, or how to truly teach the supervisors and managers on their teams how to prevent - so that’s exactly what I want to give you a framework for as we tie this all together!

Cindy and I have seen a common theme through conversations we’ve had with executives in large organizations. They’ve explained that while they have some solid leaders on their teams, many of them have come from different backgrounds and have varying views on what the organizational culture should look like. To compound that issue, each of them have far too much on their respective plates to ever have time to hash out a path for calibrating their views with their executive peers or to create a package that could be passed along to every other leader within the organization. And that’s exactly where we were able to help!

For more than 20 years now, Cindy and I have invested heavily into our own leadership journey. While a lot of that was just to survive in our own roles early on, the last ten-plus years have been focused on how we can pass what we’ve learned on to others in a way that they can achieve measurable results. Since starting Dove Development & Consulting, we’ve worked harder than either of us ever thought we were capable of to create our own brand of experience-based leadership solutions that serve leaders at any stage of their careers. In many cases, we’re able to provide a complete and comprehensive package to help address each of these profitability killers at all levels of an organization. In others, we tailor those to meet the organization’s specific needs - improving their profitability by building better leaders. 

With that in mind, we’ll look at the strategic approach we use to address those profitability killers!