If empowering our team members requires a significant change in our approach, as compared to what they’re used to seeing from us, we’ll likely receive some curious looks and even some resistance - at least at first. We recently heard an example detailing exactly that as we kicked off...

If you’re a leader with this final primary behavioral style, I have no doubt whatsoever that you’ve developed complete clarity around how each task you perform ties to your purpose and why all the other junk you deal with through the process shouldn’t bog you down. But...

Let’s face it, leaders have plenty of stress.  But it’s how we recover and how often that makes or breaks our effectiveness.  And us!

This is a two-way shift.

We have to go back and forth between stress and recovery. And they can both provide an essential opportunity for...

I’ll share this thought with you one last time:

“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...

The only way we can learn through success is by learning from failures along the way.

John Maxwell is currently writing a book titled, Return on Failure. As a matter of fact, he will share things like…Do something so big that failure is the option. In other words, you likely won’t...

When I mention making sure our team members can measure their performance, have a clear understanding of its relevance, and know their significance in the process, it doesn’t sound all that hard - and it’s not! But don’t mistake this simplicity for something that requires no...

As we’re working to provide our best team members with a reason to stay by fulfilling their need for purpose through the work they do, I’ve never seen this be accomplished more effectively than applying the same idea I referenced to address the high cost of turnover; by breaking the...

With just a basic understanding of why people do what they do, Matt was about to intentionally break the golden rule with his team and avoid so many of the costs of poor communication! By following a simple pattern, he was able to begin adding fuel to a different fire… Instead of the fire...

When I searched the phrase “results of combining leadership and management” the vast majority of the results I found were articles comparing and contrasting the two. While I make it a point to be as loud as I possibly can in emphasizing that adding manager to a title does not...

I often share stories from my first few years in manufacturing, explaining how terrifying it was back then for an engineer to hover over my shoulder with his stopwatch. I didn’t understand that he was capturing the cycle time of the machine I was operating and not necessarily timing me. I...

Once we’ve identified the root causes that truly are our profitability killers, our next step is to initiate change. In so many scenarios though, those changes seem to be expected through throwing some training at an issue and hoping it sticks… If it were some sort of new tool we...

With the importance of a “realistic, clear-eyed, complete assessment of the current state” in mind, I’ll challenge you to get really honest with yourself… Do you have that kind of clarity for what your current costs are in areas like turnover, productivity, or downtime?...