Before a potential wound festers, let’s make sure we clean it up properly. I occasionally ruffle feathers when I compare the actions our team members take to those of our children. I don’t mean that to be one bit belittling. If I’m being honest, I’m at least as capable of doing something immature (a...
Just like the work required for laying a foundation to any building to stand the test of time, establishing routines that model the core values that will ultimately serve as the foundation our organization is built on can be incredibly difficult. Before moving on, I’ve gotta ask.. Is it just me or d...
Prior to me starting at that manufacturing facility in early 1996, and for the first fifteen years I worked there, one of the largest and most reliable sources for identifying new candidates was a referral from a senior employee. As you can likely imagine, the referrals from the best employees dried...
An article called “Workplace culture and its impact on corporate reputation” from a UK-based group Igniyte, an organization dedicated to managing corporate reputations, opened with this:
A company’s reputation is all about how other people view the brand. Their perception derives from several fac...
As heavy as the weight can often be in any leadership role, we can’t lose sight of exactly who, ultimately, cares about the core values of our organization: Everyone! How we’re known, up close and from a distance, all boils down to whether or not we’ve been willing to build those values into the fou...
Someone at any level of an organization can deteriorate our relationships with long term clients as well the community around them through behavior that isn’t congruent with their core values. And regardless of their primary focus being on the people involved or the task at hand, those clients and c...
I’ll say it again: even the most talented individuals rarely form a great team without clear values serving as the foundation. For more than two decades, I’ve heard John Maxwell emphasize how “everything rises and falls on leadership.” When it comes to building a foundation on those values, those of...
We’ve looked at how things can go really wrong without strong organizational values in place and how easy it can be to fall short of providing a picture of those values for everyone on our teams. We’ve also dug into how, even with specific values listed in various places throughout our office, we ca...
Before we walk through a few steps we can take to remove every bit of ambiguity we possibly can from the core values our organization operates on, let’s tackle an issue every leader faces at one point or another: even when we detail exactly what “doing good” looks like for each of our team members, ...
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...
Whether Santa Claus comes to town or not, we can rest assured that from the moment we accept responsibility for leading our teams someone will ALWAYS be watching the example we set. Hopefully they won’t be watching when we actually are sleeping (because that’s creepy, even for Santa) but they'll def...
One of the first things I learned after I moved from running a press to training on and implementing Lean Manufacturing initiatives nearly 25 years ago was how labor efficiency rates were set. In most cases, the number of widgets that were expected on an hourly basis from any given process was based...
