As I shared in the next to last chapter of Leading With A Clear Purpose, the compliance side of human resources absolutely drains the life out of me. And putting together an employee handbook, ones where values are often listed in the first few pages but have little relevance to anything else afterw...

I remember a time very early in my behavior-based safety career when Terry Ward (who I’ve mentioned several times in this look at values and throughout my first two books), stopped by my office to chat about something. When he stepped in, I had an email pulled up from Cindy. I can’t recall what the ...

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from John Maxwell over the last decade or so was from a short session I had access to just before the larger event where I completed certification to teach and train on his material. John shared a brief lesson before fielding questions for the small grou...

Once we’ve laid a foundation around the simple practices involved with modeling our core company values and we’ve provided our teams with a consistent example of what each value living out each value looks like in practice, we should be well on our way to building the culture we’re after within our ...

Building consistent team behavior that’s based on our core company values will require removing any possible variance around what each value looks like in practice - in each individual role. But having a clear understanding of the necessary behaviors is just part of the process. It will take at leas...

In chapter eight of What’s KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!), I detailed how much confusion costs an organization and emphasized how significant the need is for leaders to set crystal-clear expectations. Chapter nine fell right in line by outlining how much profitability...

Society has countless “influencers” with significant followings. Having a high number of folks watch their foolishness online is wildly different from the responsibility leaders hold when they’ve earned genuine influence with the people on their teams, or for that matter, anyone their behavior impac...

Building a culture around values requires the leader to provide a daily example of exactly how each definition outlined in the handbook and on the wall directly applies to what’s required of them. Providing a detailed explanation, connecting those definitions to their behaviors so nothing is left to...

In the fourth lesson of our Emerging Leader Development course, Cindy and I detail five critical practices for effective communication. In that process, we emphasize just how important it is that we keep our message simple and we share it over and over and over again with absolute consistency. Cindy...

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...

Think back to what I referenced before about companies having wonderfully crafted mission and vision statements framed majestically in their lobbies for their visiting dignitaries to marvel at. Here’s the AI overview I got from adding “mission, vision, culture, values” in the Google search bar: 

A ...

While the foundation for the residential construction projects I was involved with in my teens was on a much smaller scale than the skyscrapers I alluded to earlier, they were no less important to the long term stability of the home. The same holds true for the core values in a business of any size....