Being Involved From the Start...

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, I’ve seen a ton ...

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Where Everybody Knows Your Name...

If you’ve ever seen the 80s TV show Cheers you’re probably hearing the theme sound in your mind right now, wrapping up with the line “where everyone knows your name…” Whether it’s a friendly neighborhood basement bar in Boston, your favorite local restaurant in your own hometown, or the place you ea...

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How Great Leadership Improves the Recruiting Process

Earlier I mentioned starting what I thought would be a job to get me through college on March 12, 1996 and referenced how much that organization invested into the process of hiring 40 of the close to one thousand candidates who applied. What I didn’t share was how much of that investment came during...

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The First Job of a Leader

Long before we started our leadership development business nearly a decade ago, a friend shared a struggle earlier in their career with defining reality, as a leader and owner of their quite successful organization.

As John started his story, he shared how throughout history, it has proven that pe...

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Breaking Tradition

We can certainly stick with the way it’s always been in our recruiting approach if we want, but I’ve only seen that kill more and more profitability over time. With such a drastic increase in minimum wage in a relatively short time, the “skilled trades shortage” that’s been brewing since at least th...

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What Happened to Company Culture?

More than ever, the topic of core values and specifically how to better ingrain core values into an organization's culture comes up in our leadership conversations. Anytime we talk about core values and how to keep them relevant, we have to talk about company culture. 

No matter what company value...

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The Way It’s Always Been…

On January 2, 1996, I had an epiphany! While scraping ice off the 2x4 purlins before nailing down roofing metal for the poultry house I was helping build, I realized that I didn’t want to make a living as a carpenter for the rest of my life. Truth be told, I didn’t really want to do it for the rest ...

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Recruiting Great Candidates Comes with a High Price Tag

Having just wrapped up our look at how high turnover kills so much of an organization’s profitability, it just makes sense to shift our focus to the costs of recruiting. If we are indeed able to provide our best team members with a solid reason to stay, the pressure to add anyone with a pulse to the...

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Part of Something Bigger!

If we’re serious about giving our best team members a solid reason to stay by providing them with purpose and we’ve invested the energy into understanding the reasons that drive their behavior, we should certainly have a solid foundation. But when we can connect all of that to how each task they eng...

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Why Shared Values Matter

In looking at turnover rates and profitability of organizations, it's hard to miss the continuing trend towards companies needing and seeking a better culture.  The good news is there’s increased interest in serving well from the values statement we have on our walls.  The bad news is, it’s hard to ...

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For Different Reasons…

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 golden rule! But...

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A Reason to Stay

Now that we’ve identified some of the causes of turnover, specifically the reasons great team members leave an organization voluntarily and the high costs associated with that voluntary turnover, and we’ve looked at the extended reach of those costs, let’s get to work at addressing this profitabilit...

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