During a phone call with a lifelong friend, I heard one of the most unique combinations of passion and despair that I can remember. He shared how he felt like he was just going through the motions in one aspect of his professional life, grinding his teeth through each project he completed, but const...

If we think back to how we started this look at Leadership Misunderstood, the biggest myths we’ve taken aim at here were few but extremely common:

• People automatically follow a business owner, executive, manager (or whatever other title you want to insert here) because their paycheck depends on i...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We’ll soon start working through the tangible benefits an organization can expect from an effective employee orientation program but before we go too far into the HOW, we have to nail down the WHO and the WHY! Otherwise, any steps we take won’t likely make the impact we’re hoping for…

Once we have ...

If you’re still on the fence as to whether or not employee engagement has a real financial impact on your business, or even your department within a business, take one more look at just the low numbers I shared recently… Now it’s time to dig into some things we can each do to start earning engagemen...

As we started looking at How to be More Productive, I shared what I thought was a great example of how impactful systems can be in helping us knock out even the most dreaded tasks - like cleaning the kitchen… We also started looking at why productivity gets so much of our attention, the need for eff...

We’ve recently looked at the importance of recruitment and retention and we’ve dug into some key recruitment and retention strategies. Since much of that was focused on how much getting good at retaining great people can eliminate much of the pressure to fill a position with nearly anyone who has a ...

Through the last several posts, we’ve been working through the importance of enjoying each step of the journey rather than resting on the hope that fulfillment will come once we reach that ever so important goal we’re chasing. I even used the last post to share an example of just how badly I’ve fail...