In my experience over the last two decades, I can’t point to a single company that I’ve worked for or with where no values were listed anywhere; in the employee handbook at a minimum, but often painted on the walls in prominent areas throughout the facility as well. With much of my experience with t...
The interaction we’ve had with Craig, Kim, and their team over the years since they bought their business has given us a ton of clarity for the critical role values can play in a business. That experience has also helped us develop a clearer picture of who we can best serve through the work we’re do...
Over the course of my close to fifty years on this ball of mud, I’ve learned that the only people who truly like change are the ones who came up with the idea for the specific change that’s happening in any given moment. I can tolerate change when I have some level of control in how it occurs or whe...
As we developed more clarity around the values of the clients we enjoyed working with the most, we found more and more opportunities to challenge them on how to tie those values to nearly every conversation they had with their teams. This didn’t require major changes in what they were already doing;...
As Cindy and I worked to learn and understand what each member of our Executive Leadership Elite Think Tank had as core values for their organizations, we had intense conversations with all of them regarding how they kept those values in front of their teams; how often and in what setting did they c...
Throughout our professional lives, Cindy and I had seen a wide range of values defined by the organizations we were part of. A few either had no clearly defined values to speak of or they just never referenced them. Others had a couple of values listed in a policy manual or on a bulletin board but d...
I blocked my calendar on the afternoon for February 24, 2022 to roll out that new handbook for all the team members working with Craig and Kim. Having done similar roll-outs several times in the decade leading up to it, I had a picture in my mind of what to expect - and I dreaded it! While my goal w...
Having been a few years since I handled all aspects of human resources for an organization on a daily basis, and never dealing with an ownership transition, I left that initial dinner meeting with a list of items I’d need to dig into prior to their upcoming acquisition date. As much as I never liked...
I wrapped up Leading With A Clear Purpose by sharing how having our own extremely clear purpose helped us push through the Covid mandates that prevented us from capitalizing on the momentum we had built in our business going into 2020 and doing much billable work for anyone in the second half of tha...
In 2012, I made my first significant career change in more than a decade. While I had a hand in various human resource tasks and projects during the dozen or so years I led our facility’s behavior-based safety process and supported many of our company’s locations across North America that were activ...
When we’ve done the work to create the kind of atmosphere that great people want to be a part of, because they see the impact our organization makes and they have a desire to be involved in something that matters, and we’ve invested the necessary energy to have at least a foundational level of compe...
To be able to put a little purpose behind the mission, vision, and values we want our teams to connect with and live out - or even be able to connect with them ourselves - it’s never as simple as reading words from a page. Let’s be honest, most companies have core values listed on their websites, in...
