Growth & Leadership Insights

Your Culture – Your Choice

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Organizational culture is always evolving, moving in one of two directions. One track leads towards more openness, collaboration and transparency. Moving the other direction brings greater control and dependence. A leader’s vision and beliefs, when aligned with the organization’s, drive the cultural direction for the business. And that choice impacts growth and sustainability, how the company operates and how it prioritizes potential investments. Given the increasingly dynamic nature of markets, the incessant rate of change, …

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3 Questions People Ask To Judge Their Leader’s Credibility

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Credibility is the primary reason that people choose to follow their leaders. Numerous studies validate this fact.  Credibility is the quality of being believed and trusted. It’s about reliability, authenticity and accountability… walking the talk, keeping promises. People ask 3 questions to judge their leader’s credibility: 1. “Can I trust you?” Credible leaders understand that their actions live long after their words. Leading by example and fulfilling promises strengthen a leader’s credibility. Encouraging comparable behavior among all team members builds …

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Questions for Leaders

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The pace of economic change continues to accelerate, driven by global competition, rapid developments in technology, and the shift in transaction power from seller to buyer. Businesses are perpetually disrupted by the need to respond faster in creating strategic value for customers, or suffer the consequences if they cannot do so quickly enough.  It’s an economy that demands agility and innovation to create value and sustainability. Creating value is difficult work, much more challenging than extracting it …

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Proposing Investments, not Transactions

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How you respond to a prospect’s inquiry determines their first impression about your company and how you do business. It’s your initial, perhaps only, opportunity to differentiate yourself in their eyes.  Reacting with urgency is essential, but promptly proposing a product or service to address their immediate pain, without first seeking to learn why resolving the problem is important, wastes an opportunity to reveal your organization’s experience and competency, and your genuine interest in their success. Your proposal will …

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Adapting to Customer Centricity

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Bob Schultek Author of  The Gauntlet In this increasingly customer-centric market, here are some organizational issues to consider: To generate growth, profitability and sustainability, ensuring that a business is continually creating strategic value for customers is a primary responsibility for leadership. Creating value for the business begins by first creating value for customers; customer value is monetized to validate its contribution to business value. To reliably create strategic value and strengthen sustainability, the business: –Discovers what customers value, …

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Creating Value

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  Our time is a finite, unrecoverable resource which makes it very valuable. As a leader, precious time is expected to create value for the organization. Did your leadership help your people create value today? What benefits were produced for your customers and your organization in return for the time you and they invested? Ford’s Model T was more efficient to build than any other automobile at the time, so each worker produced far more value …

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5 Keys For Teams That Move Faster

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Bob Schultek Author of  The Gauntlet Profitable growth relies upon the preservation of enduring customer relationships. Sustaining these relationships demands that a business consistently produce more strategic value for a key customer than can be gained elsewhere – value that contributes to the customer’s progress. A key factor in creating strategic value is moving faster – faster in delivering results, adapting to changing needs, and innovating. When Google wanted to move faster, they formed small, cross-functional teams to …

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5 Attributes That Drive Strategy Execution

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Bob Schultek Author of The Gauntlet The start of a new year often marks the launch or refinement of strategy. Inherent in this process is change, acting in a new or different way. To execute a new strategy, leaders must identify advocates, change agents who work within the current system, and have the ability and will to drive the change necessary for the strategy to succeed. A key characteristic for strategy advocates is their capacity for critical thinking. In …

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Questions to Ponder

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Bob Schultek Author of  The Gauntlet The holiday season can be hectic, but as the last year morphs into the new one, there are also rare, quiet moments that are opportunities for reflection. Take advantage of these occasions – from experience, you know that they will be much harder to find once your active work schedule again beckons. What were you able to accomplish last year? What worked, and what didn’t? Why is that? How …

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Two Points That Make Performance Discussions Matter

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Bob Schultek Author of The Gauntlet With the year-end approaching, ’tis the season of performance evaluations. Some organizations have abandoned the regimen of formal performance discussions, while others preserve a review process, often replacing annual discussions with quarterly or semi-annual ones. Opinions and rationales vary about the value of these individual assessments. But in this age of perpetual change, with its organizational demands for greater agility, innovation and improvement, the case for observing some performance management protocol is …

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