News and Events

How Strong Is Your Leadership Agility?

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Increasingly, leaders are describing their operating environment as dynamic, unpredictable, and complex, reflecting shifting market trends that are concurrently impacting their customers. It’s an environment that challenges their established means of creating value, for customers and themselves. They need to promptly and profitably adapt to these highly dynamic circumstances, but often feel unprepared to do so. And the future promises that this trend will continue to accelerate. The traditional response to helping leaders succeed has …

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Ensuring Your Message Is Heard

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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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Purposeful Reflections

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Last weekend, I gathered with classmates and cherished friends for our 50th college reunion. After revisiting time-worn stories and tired jokes, we began to reflect on our shared experience all those years ago. At that time, we had arrived at our esteemed university with just our dreams, and a common goal of learning and growing to build our future. Our hard work, the dedication of our teachers, and the values instilled by our families had produced the opportunity, but it was …

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The Quest for Transformation

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The prime directive for leaders is to make things better – to improve results, strengthen culture, develop talent, nurture relationships. Some leaders see their mission as going beyond improvement, to leading a transformation of their operation or business. But transformation can result in a broad array of outcomes depending on multiple variables including the circumstances of the business, the impact of the culture, or the experience and vision of the leader. Some transformations are small …

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Assessing Candidate Attitude

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Our search for predictability is ever challenged by the incessant disruption of change. When trying to attract and hire talented people, this is a critical consideration. Job postings cite requirements and experience levels, but most often, the actual performance differentiator for new hires is not what they do, but rather how they do it – their attitude, and how well aligned it is with the culture of your business. This is not news; those who …

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Where The Real Power Resides

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When it comes to strategy, those with authority and power are often different people. Leaders may develop and authorize strategy, but the real power to execute it resides with those they lead. The real power is usually foundational, grounded in the company’s culture. Strategy is change; change is risky and the outcome is uncertain. Those charged with implementing strategy, and adapting it in reaction to circumstances, need to understand why the change is necessary, as …

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The Improvement Journey

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Every innovation or improvement effort begins by defining the problem. In addition to describing it, this definition should answer a few questions: How serious is it? How urgent is it? How costly will it be to resolve? While soliciting stakeholders to collaborate in resolving the problem, it’s important to confirm that everyone agrees that there is a problem, and that it’s solvable. Some may see the problem as a condition that cannot be resolved, that …

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Driving Change Amidst Turmoil

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Supply chain challenges and rampant inflation continue to disrupt businesses of all sizes, causing them to revise strategies and priorities as they adapt to new realities. Having navigated Covid shutdowns, and the subsequent transitions back to work, leaders are now compelled to control rapidly escalating costs that are crushing margins and constraining the achievement of revenue goals.   It’s one thing for leaders to drive proactive, productive change when the business is growing; it’s another when strategy and structure revisions are required in …

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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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Resilient Culture

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In the last ten years, we’ve experienced more change in business than ever before.  The way we work will necessarily keep evolving – we’ll need to work differently.And new, different work will need to be done.  Operating productively with this level of required flexibility will compel every business to rely more heavily on its culture. Hence the increasing dialogue about the value of culture in executing strategy and adapting with agility.   Leaders who are more comfortable …

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