Leadership Earned by "The First American"

As I mentioned before, Benjamin Franklin’s voice as a Founding Father didn’t carry such significant weight because of any particular position he held, although he did make a significant impact in several different roles. His influence was largely something he earned throughout the...

Continue Reading...
Author, Inventor, and Influencer

While many think of him with quotes like “a penny saved is a penny earned” or “early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,” I’m quite fond of the response he gave Elizabeth Willing Powel when she asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a...

Continue Reading...
A Foundation Thatā€™s Held Firm

Having worked through what felt like a fairly comprehensive list of ways ineffective leadership and poor communication kill profitability in far too many businesses over the last several months, let’s change gears a bit and revisit an idea I introduced in this series in early 2020 - one I...

Continue Reading...
Expansive Leader Development, Driving Engagement!

Whether there’s an exemplary top-down approach throughout the organization we’re a part of or not, each of us will be able to achieve better results within our own areas of leadership responsibility when we earn genuine buy-in from the team reporting to us! This particular thing, as...

Continue Reading...
A Top-Down Leadership Approach

If the owners or executives in any organization want to have the best shot possible at improving profitability by building better leaders, they will need to be just as engaged in developing their own leadership and communication skills as they are in providing any kind of resource to the key...

Continue Reading...
They May Stop Askingā€¦

If you think back to one of the first things I called your attention to in this process of addressing these profitability killers, one of the things we covered as we looked at how it all starts at the top - or at least the best returns can be captured when that’s the case - was the...

Continue Reading...
Bad Leaders Kill Profitability!

I completely understand how many issues demand the attention of a business owner, an executive, a manager, and even front line supervisors every single day! But if we’re going to be the leader that truly does provide our team members with what they’re looking for - and deserve - from...

Continue Reading...
Combining Leadership & Management

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...

Continue Reading...
It's Not a Question of Either/Or!

One of the most powerful lessons I learned in the fifteen or so years I worked in behavior-based safety had nothing to do with safety and was only indirectly related to human behavior… That lesson was in how much the act of serving others impacted the influence an individual could have on...

Continue Reading...
Changing the Approach

If we want to have the exponential impact I referenced recently, I don’t believe there’s any other option than to buy into the idea that it all starts at the top! While there will certainly still be plenty of hard days, changing the approach we take will be one of the most critical...

Continue Reading...
People Do What People Seeā€¦

Expecting anyone to blindly Follow the Leader is more than a little naive, especially over extended periods of time or in performing difficult tasks, because our teams are much more apt to do what they see us doing when we’re in similar situations! But let’s be honest with ourselves...

Continue Reading...
Follow the Leader...?

Having just worked through the importance of responsiveness, especially when it comes to showing we value the teams we lead and maintain the influence we’ve worked to earn with the folks on those teams, I want to challenge you to really think into this question: Why is it important to lead...

Continue Reading...