Over the last few weeks, I’ve started developing a friendship with a gentleman who teaches at a local university. I had seen him from a distance nearly every time I’ve been at the gym since Cindy and I moved our membership there six months or so ago, but we just hadn’t crossed paths directly until r...
Let’s assume we’ve accepted our leadership responsibility and we’ve actually following through by doing the work necessary to make sure our team members are indeed measuring the right things so they have a clear picture of their performance AND we’ve provided them with absolute clarity about how tho...
Periodically, a parade of managers would gather around those nifty bulletin boards I mentioned last time and they’d expect the area lead person to give them a run down of everything that was plotted on all the charts they were supposed to be updating each hour. In the cases where the lead had actual...
As I think back to the nearly two decades I worked in a manufacturing facility, it seems like we measured everything! If you’ve ever been through an ISO-9000 audit, or whatever the number is now (it was TS-16949 in the automotive manufacturing world as recently as eight years ago), you know there’s ...
Contrary to what seems to have become a far too popular belief, how we each make our living doesn’t have to drain every ounce of joy from our bodies… I remember greeting ole Front-Lobby Bobby one morning more than a decade ago and being given a response for the ages, “Just another day closer to dyin...
How many times have you had a task on your to-do list that you just didn’t want to mess with? You know, one that was not only a pain in the butt to deal with but also something you didn’t really understand why it even needed to be done? Assuming you’re picturing at least half a dozen examples of you...
So here’s the reality of it all… All the profit in the world, even when it’s a direct result of building a positive work environment, won’t be what motivates our team members - especially if we’re trying to hang onto every stinking penny of it - unless we can provide something truly meaningful to ea...
Never mind the 15% overall revenue growth the AP News article I referenced in The Importance of Organizational Culture detailed… While we’re at it, let’s also disregard the turnover costs of up to 300% of an employee’s salary I share from Hireology in The Benefits of Effective Onboarding… And for no...
Creating an atmosphere where our team members don’t throw up when they think about working for us involves more than just avoiding the urge to be an insufferable jerk by demoralizing everyone we manage and yelling louder when they don’t heed our every command. There might not be cause to celebrate j...
Last time I referenced how terrible it was to work for one of the most miserable human beings I’ve ever been around. Just in case you think I may have been embellishing it, you’re welcome to reach out to Cindy and ask for the rest of the story that I shared with her shortly after I wrote that… If an...
What flashbacks do you have when you think about your most miserable job ever? There was an NCIS episode where Abby and McGee go back and forth with one another sharing their worst jobs before joining Team Gibbs. It started out with the boring ones and rapidly morphed into the most disgusting ones -...
Since you’ve accepted the responsibility of leading your team, I’m going to assume you’re taking what we’ve dug into up to this point to heart by identifying what you really value and defining exactly why those things are meaningful to you - so don’t prove my faith in you wrong here! With that work ...
