As we’ve worked through each of these individual profitability killers, my goal has been to provide you with some basic, practical steps you can take in applying specific behaviors that help you communicate with and lead your team members more effectively, making a measurable difference in...
Several years ago while working with a group of extremely skilled employees in a construction company, one of the most senior guys was grumbling about some of the new folks who had been hired. He was frustrated because they didn’t know everything he expected them to know right away and...
If we’re going to build profitable succession plans, creating advancement opportunities that are a bit outside the traditional approach of promoting (read: pushing) our best team members into supervisory or management roles primarily based on their technical expertise and work ethic will...
In seeing how much profitability we can miss out on when we lose credibility and our team becomes less loyal, and those certainly aren’t the only issues we’ll see if we aren’t holding our team members accountable, one may ask why a leader would even consider allowing this to go...
OK leaders, I’m counting on you to have done the work to address the last profitability killer we looked at, The Cost of Confusion, by taking the steps to set clear expectations for your teams. Even with the most detailed explanation though, we’re not likely to see our team members...
I doubt it would be very difficult to choose which management team you would have preferred working for, the one where everybody knows your name or the one where NOBODY seemed to care if you had a name, especially if all the other factors involved were about the same… Quite frankly,...
Consider the 17 hours of downtime due to clarifying communications that SIS International Research study cited as an average weekly loss for companies with 100 employees. After spending close to two decades in a manufacturing environment, I see a lot through that lens. To me, that downtime...
Learning that it took ten full years to make a change within Chick-fil-A that, al least from the outside looking in, seemed like something fairly simple, I’m guessing you’re on the same page with me as to why we cannot expect to say anything just once and get our entire team on the...
There are so many ways that effective top down leadership can reduce and even eliminate the profitability killers in our businesses, and we’ll start unpacking some simple strategies for dealing several of the highest risk areas soon, but one way we can ensure we achieve the best possible...
Several years ago, I asked a client who was struggling to attract and retain good team members why they treated their customers so well but didn’t extend that same treatment to their employees. The owner of the company told me that it was because he paid his employees to do what he told...
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...
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...
