But Wes, you’re not hearing me… It’s just not in the budget and that’s just the way it goes with turnover, we’ve got to keep our focus on doing the work that pays the bills! I know that feeling all too well… Heck, that was the reality I lived with every day...

Last time I shared the snarky response I gave a friend when they said there wasn’t any money in their company’s budget for developing the people in roles with leadership responsibility, saying he seemed to have plenty in the budget for turnover… Truth be told, I’ve rarely...

Having recently worked through The Lasting Impact of Positive Leadership, and what that can mean in the lives of team members we’re responsible for, I can’t imagine you’re reading this right now if you’re not convinced of the value… That said, no one magically...

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...

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...

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...

So the lack of accountability that we’re seeing more and more frequently across what seems like all sectors of society isn’t all that new, but I absolutely believe it’s becoming more acceptable! But even with the examples we’ve looked at to this point, is it really a big...

Having started with the stark contrast between happy employees, satisfied employees, and engaged employees, then looking at the real impact employee engagement can have on our organization’s bottom line before we began working through these strategies we can put in place to earn that kind...

In The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Patrick Lencioni mentioned that two of the signs were important for every team member to understand if we want them to have a clear picture of how they can engage and why it matters. We’ve already hit on IRRELEVANCE and we’ll touch on something...

Having made a case for why it may not serve us all that well to focus only on ensuring our employees’ happiness or satisfaction, and working to actually engage them ties more directly to the results we need to achieve, we should probably take the time to define employee engagement before...

Building on what we looked at last time about our cultural obsession with productivity, I’ll share an example of something I learned as I was working to implement Lean Manufacturing initiatives in the facility I worked at for nearly twenty years…

We all tend to have our own way of...

Last time I suggested that the only real difference between soft skills and hard skills is that most hard skills only tie to certain fields where soft skills have the power of impacting nearly any type of work we’ll ever engage in. None of us come out of the womb being amazingly equipped...