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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Risk

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A few weeks back, I wrote about assessing risk, and was intrigued by responses that expressed concern about balancing the traditional acceptance of reasonable business risk with what some described as “the current disproportionate focus on personal safety.”   We know that progress involves risk; nothing significant is accomplished without it. Included in the evaluation of acceptable risk is preserving, to the best of our ability, the well-being of those asked to undertake it. We make this …

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About Promises

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Organizational culture is a core element of sustainable competitive advantage. Talented people gravitate to companies who care about their employees and customers, companies whose leaders measure and strengthen their culture, recognizing its impact on their ability to create value.  One tactic that demonstrates this value proposition is making and keeping promises. In a world where customers have many options available to them, “promising” an outcome, and then delivering it, is a differentiator.   A promise is deeper than …

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Developing CEO Successors

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When the need to identify a CEO successor becomes urgent, the probability of finding the best person is improved when that need is anticipated in advance. Developing CEO successors should be a deliberate, robust process involving your advisors or directors, and potentially the successor candidates themselves. Many companies rely on external organizations, experienced with succession issues and methods, to help develop and support this process.  One key element in productive succession planning is purposefully identifying and developing potential …

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How Best to Persuade

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Some leaders rely heavily on data to persuade their teams to embrace a needed change. Data is perceived as credible, making it a powerful means to convey the impact of a change. Data is influential and convincing, a necessary ingredient of every change rationale.  But there’s no emotion in data, and it’s that emotion that brings the data to life, that makes it memorable, enabling people to connect with the need for a change. Most people have …

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