For the majority of folks who are investing their time into reading this, I’m guessing you need little additional convincing to ensure you’re being intentional about addressing each of the things that made the list of top reasons for turnover… But at some point in time, each of...

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...

As we build a top down leadership model that has a positive impact on recruitment and retention throughout our facility, we can expect that same leadership style to drive results in our areas too as long as we understand the difference between servant leadership and subservient leadership. I...

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...

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...

The author of the Forbes article I referenced before continued supporting the idea that It All Starts at the Top by citing a Gallup’s “State of the American Manager” report in sharing that “one in two employees has quit their job because of a bad boss at some point in...

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...