Setting Team Expectations

Leaders don’t improve results all by themselves; the people in the business produce the results, because they want to grow and succeed. Leaders do create the conditions that enable those they lead to fulfill their aspirations, to achieve their Company, and their developmental, goals. One of these conditions is setting expectations. Once their expectations are understood, leaders can cultivate their team’s shared commitment – to one another and to goal achievement. Productive expectations include these …

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The New Year’s Liminal Moment

The new year is off and running. Your schedule is filling, and the work is ramping up. It’s a unique liminal moment when you’re entering the portal of the new year, and can still look back at the last one. Before challenges and changing priorities capture much of your time, there’s an opportunity to assess your progress from ‘what is’ to ‘what can be,’ to evaluate what worked well and what must improve. Last year, …

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Generosity and Appreciation

While the holiday season can be busy and demanding, take time to reflect and to consider the joyfulness of being with others. The holidays are a time of generosity and appreciation, kindled by our experiences with family, friends, and community. Generosity comes in many forms, and all of them are gifts, generating gratitude in the recipient and the giver. Author Seth Godin says it well: “Generosity and gratitude often go together. They light a path …

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Your Team’s Two Types of Labor

We know that the most effective teams collaborate, take ownership, and improve results. We know that the leaders who build these teams have the experience and emotional intelligence to understand how their mindsets and actions affect those they lead, enabling the development of trust that strengthens relationships and cultivates their teams’ shared accountability. And, we know that these leaders, who rightly acknowledge their responsibility to develop the talents of those they lead, continuously engage with …

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The Prime Directive for Service

Customer relationships are valuable, fragile, and the foundation of your business. Your customer-service personnel are your front-line representatives, the face of your business. When something does not go as planned, how they respond to your customer-in-need makes all the difference in how that customer appraises the value of your relationship. How are your service people trained to respond? Do they deliver a scripted reply, based on what they can see on their computer screen, and …

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Finding the Space to React

Urgent issues and changing priorities – these are the daily experiences of leadership. That’s why this insight from Viktor Frankl, offered by David Noble and Carol Kauffman in their book “Real Time Leadership,” is valuable: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” This space between a stimulus and a response provides the time for leaders …

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Culture Drives Performance

Increasingly, the discussions I’m having with leaders focus on how to better leverage their culture to improve performance. We’ve experienced more change in the past few years than we’ve ever seen before. The work to be done is evolving, it’s different; so, the way we get it done must be different. Culture is how a business gets things done. It defines who you are as a company and what you believe. While your purpose or …

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To Solve or To Sell

Inflation and incremental supply chain issues continue to breed uncertainty for your customers, increasing their risk and their focus on price. If your strategy is to sell value creation rather than low price, then you’re likely finding that it’s more challenging to execute your strategy. Because increased volatility tends to shorten a customer’s planning horizon, each transaction is often assessed in isolation, for its short-term advantage. A price-first priority is helpful to customers since it …

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Ensuring Your Message Is Heard

When there’s a serious message to deliver, we often ponder the words we want to use, redrafting them, and practicing how we’ll deliver them, until we think we have it right. But despite all our best efforts, many messages are not understood as intended. One reason this occurs is because we tend to communicate messages the way we like to hear them, without considering how our listeners might hear them. Combine this tendency with the …

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Self Interest to Shared Accountability

Before there can be accountability, there must be responsibility. The responsibility of committing to a decision, of taking ownership of a challenge, of striving to make a difference. It’s the opposite of compliance – of just doing the job, of not taking a risk, of doing what everyone else is doing. What matters is a person’s willingness to see what’s wrong or what could be better, and then striving to do something about it. It’s …

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