Making Work Meaningful
When people experience their work as meaningful, they are more engaged, committed, and satisfied – all of which increase performance.
Growth & Leadership Insights
The Quest for Enduring Improvement
Leadership is about achieving sustainable results that enhance competitive advantage and deliver measurable business benefits. It’s a quest for enduring improvement. Successful improvement projects begin by asking what is possible, before considering what is wrong. Leaders and teams collaborate to envision positive outcomes and set clear improvement goals before assessing current processes. When mapping existing processes, clarify responsibilities and measure time for each step. Then, focus on the time lost between each step; this is …
The Skill of Building Trust
Trust is the foundation of all caring, beneficial relationships – both personal and professional. It enables open communication, genuine commitment, and mutual accountability. For leaders, trust is the key to motivating action and driving sustainable progress. The genesis of trust is generosity – a genuine intention to help others. Trustworthy leaders build this foundation of trust in two ways: But even the best leaders will face situations that threaten trust. It may be caused by …
Measuring the Impact of Culture
A company’s culture binds an organization together, facilitating strategy execution and performance improvements. When appreciated and nurtured, a culture’s distinctive characteristics create a unique identity that’s hard for competitors to copy, providing an enduring competitive advantage. Winning cultures see performance as an explicit output, and foster an environment that is conducive to generating the best possible results for their customers, employees, and other key stakeholders. The behaviors modelled by these cultures help employees see their …
Welcoming Requests For More Communication
Leaders are often challenged with requests for more communication. These appeals may simply reflect a need for more information about the condition of the business, or the status of a strategy, new policy, or change initiative. But often, they signal a deeper yearning to share feedback with you, feedback you should welcome and encourage from those stakeholders most impacted by planned or implemented strategies or change initiatives. As you consider your response to these requests, …
Solving, Not Selling
To grow your business, you can add new customers, raise your average unit price, or increase your orders from existing customers. The third strategy has proven to be the most productive method for generating sustainable growth; successfully implement one of the other two as well, and growth can be exponential. Key to increasing your business with current customers is proving that you’re focused on solving, not selling – that you’re not seeking one-time transactions, but …
The Nexus of Purpose and Time
The nexus of purpose and time is progress – the prime directive for every leader. Time is currency, and in the end, it’s the only currency that matters. There’s only so much of it, and it’s unrecoverable. While reacting to your daily barrage of issues, many of them urgent, it’s easy to lose track of how much valuable time is being consumed in reaction mode. And then there are the unexpected distractions, the changing priorities, …
Leveraging Competitive Advantage
You’ve invested much to create and strengthen your competitive advantage; it’s a combination of your offerings and your culture. Leveraging it to productively drive your growth, in an increasingly dynamic market, compels you to consider how best to invest your precious time and resources going forward. Your customers, your competitors, and you are simultaneously experiencing the same evolving market trends, so what is valued, and what creates value, is changing more rapidly. Staying abreast of …
Self-Interest to Shared Commitment
Before there can be accountability, there must be commitment. Commitment is taking ownership of a challenge, being responsible for resolving it, in alignment with your company’s goals and values. It reflects an obligation, by leader and team, to improve something that makes a difference. And because it requires the assumption of risk, commitment is much more than consensus. Commitment requires that your team grasps why a goal, strategy or action is necessary, and is willing …
Sustaining a Strategic Focus
The leadership mandate is: The leadership challenge is to develop an operating style that fulfills this mandate while effectively managing persistent, short-term, changing priorities that demand attention. If your team’s time is consumed with resolving urgent issues, then the vital, longer-term improvement work goes undone; you’re always reacting, not leading. Key to sustaining a productive balance between short and long-term priorities is consistently integrating strategy into team discussions. Certainly, there are times when leaders must …
