I recently read an article a friend published on LinkedIn called “Why ‘Purpose’ Might Not Be the Answer (and What to Do Instead)” where he opened by saying “lofty purpose statements can feel abstract and disconnected from employees’ day-to-day tasks. Shared challenges, on the other hand, are specifi...

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 their websites, in...

Providing our teams with clarity around the mission, vision, and values that we’re working toward as an organization can be powerful! One thing I see many leaders struggle with though is keeping those in front of their team members consistently. From the start of this look at the importance of leadi...

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 vision, it’s far more like...

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 strengthen o...

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 this forward throu...

I’ll say it once more in case you missed it, nothing hurts as much when we have a definite purpose! The one thing I can assure you of though is that there were plenty of times in the decade that followed that last story where I wasn’t sure we were actually winning. But as I look back at it, I can po...

From March 2013 to September 2014, less than half of the time in my full time role was dedicated to interviewing, hiring, and onboarding team members for roles throughout the manufacturing facility I worked for. In that time, I hired 225 people. Just out of curiosity, can you guess how many people y...

As we looked into What’s Love Got to Do With It?, I again referenced how our “employees’ willingness to exceed the call of duty” can “lead to a 57% improvement in discretionary effort” and “on average, a 20% improvement in individual productivity” per the Harvard Business Review. But if we want to h...

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 two decade...

Earlier I shared how my purpose in chasing that first role off the manufacturing floor was a far cry from definite but grew a bit closer when I took the initial trip to provide training at another facility within the company. Over the years that followed, my purpose became more definite and began re...

Knowing the potential teams bring to the table, why do some people still want to do things by themselves?

Let’s face it: there are many things that we could just do ourselves to get things done faster. Has that ever been the case for you? Of course, it has! When this shows up, we need to assess whe...