Bob Schultek

Bob has more than 30 years of service as a senior sales and business development executive, CEO and business owner. His expertise includes customer-partnered business development, strategic planning, sales management, customer service, operational alignment, lean process analysis and improvement, quality assurance, and performance management. He has worked in the energy, medical device, bioscience & pharmaceutical, discrete and process manufacturing, packaging and distribution, communications and information technology, and business-to-business service industries.

Innovate or Stagnate

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A leader’s pursuit of improvement relies on fostering initiative and innovation. Without them, progress and profitable agility are not possible. It’s either innovate or stagnate.   Innovation doesn’t require you to understand the future; it requires that you understand your customers’ evolving needs and goals, and how your business must operate to fulfill them better than anyone.  These steps nurture initiative and innovation:  1.      Communicate that innovation is a “must-have.” Allocate time for individuals to spend on innovation. Encourage them to challenge widely-held assumptions and discount those that inhibit curiosity and creativity; listen to each …

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3 Vital Tasks for Welcoming a New Leader

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The start of a new year may find you welcoming a new leader to your team. Key to your onboarding effort is emphasizing the need to build relationships that are essential for the leader’s success.  Guiding your new leader to accomplish these 3 tasks will support that objective, and help establish the leader’s effectiveness and credibility:  1. Align current circumstances with expectations. New leaders must quickly gain clarity about the path ahead and your expectations for them. As …

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Accelerating Progress

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It won’t be long before excessively busy schedules, endless meetings and heavy workloads again become the norm. Before that happens, there’s an opportunity to assess your, and your business’, journey from “what is” to “what can be.” It’s an exercise that can help accelerate your progress in 2022.  Like most leaders, the professional portion of this evaluation often touches on your three primary functions: Your management role – the responsibility for guiding your people to achieve goals …

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Reflections

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With the year-end approaching, it’s a good time to assess your progress – personally and professionally.  Amidst continued uncertainty, it’s constructive to hit pause and reconnect with guiding values and beliefs, to count blessings, to reflect on what’s been achieved, and to appreciate those accomplishments which make you most proud.  Months or years from now, there will be new experiences and new skills, new friends, family and customers, new successes and challenges, new titles or …

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Who Leaders Need

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While seeking to improve results, leaders are perpetually balancing the preservation of the status quo with the need for innovation and improvement.   Keep what’s working, with its efficiency, reduced risk and expected result, or challenge the organization to consider the possibilities of doing something better, pursuing productive change in which the outcome is uncertain.  Because the leader relies on others to help determine the right balance in this exercise, and to drive change when that is what’s required, hiring the right people …

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How Customer Service Inhibits or Drives Growth?

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Providing satisfactory customer service is a greater challenge now than it has ever been. At a time when isolation has elevated the need for service, finding enough of the right people, and enabling them to promptly and personally answer inquiries or resolve problems, can be a daunting task.   For leaders, this reality offers an opportunity to reconsider the role that customer service plays in their operations. Does it inhibit or drive their growth?  Some see customer …

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3 Ways to Build Trusting Relationships in the Virtual Work Environment

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One of the leadership challenges that our Covid experience is leaving in its wake is how best to preserve culture. What’s the most productive balance between in-person and virtual time together to ensure that the community which lives the culture and built the business continues to deliver progress and success? Trusting relationships are the foundation of culture, so preserving trust is vital to sustaining culture. Trust has two dimensions – one is logic and the other is …

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3 Steps for Conflict Resolution

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To secure a team’s commitment to a direction, decision or action, it may be necessary for a leader to resolve differing opinions. This is accomplished by striving to get all opinions on the table, and then employing empathy, discovery and tenacity to move towards a resolution.  1.      Leveraging empathy. Leaders who begin a conflict dialogue by empathetically listening to the differing perspectives, seeking to discover why the differences exist, know that this process accelerates resolution while enabling the various stakeholders to learn …

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Be Aware of Your Metrics – You Get What You Measure

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In 1975, Charles Goodhart, a respected moentary policy theorist who has spent most of his career at the Bank of England and the London School of Economics, uttered a perceptive phrase that came to be known as Goodhart’s Law. Today, his observation is cited regularly, across a variety of industries from banking to medicine to manufacturing, because it states a valuable insight about how the modern world operates.  Goodhart’s Law says that: “Any observed statistical regularity …

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Investment Priorities

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For leaders, there are always problems – a parade of challenges that command your attention. Systems are down, people or organizations are working against you, or there’s a compelling difficulty that needs resolution.  There are always opportunities as well – innovative ideas or new relationships waiting to be embraced. These are chances to create value, to share or give, to move faster, or to make something better.  And there are always limits – limited time, energy, money …

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