organization

Do you get your customers? Empathize if you want to strengthen the bond

You’re experiencing unknown aches and pains in part of your body, so you schedule an appointment to see your doctor. During the examination, the doctor doesn’t ask any questions or conduct any tests. Instead, she says, “Here’s what I think is wrong with you” and then prescribes a medicine that has nothing to do with…

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Re-Recruiting: Your Best Defense Against Restless Feet

Suppose one-third of your employees suddenly walked off the job. Think it might impact your ability to serve your customers and achieve your strategic goals? Granted, the odds of every third employee taking a hike all at once are slim. But according to a recent survey conducted by MetLife, 36 percent of employees hope to…

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Measuring What Matters: How to Stop Wasting Time, Talent, and Resources on Projects that Don’t Go Anywhere

Remember the old adage, “what gets measured, gets done?” Well, what does not get measured may still be getting done in your organization as well. Unfortunately, it may not be what you want done or what gets you to your destination. In today’s volatile markets, goals set in January can easily become out of date…

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Too Busy to Keep Up? Develop Resilience.

Resilient (riˆzilyÉnt): able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed; able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions. Wow. Talk about the perfect description for leading an organization in the current business environment! Today’s business leaders need an increasingly diverse and sophisticated array of skills, traits, and aptitudes….

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Tear Down These Walls!

In 1987, president Ronald Reagan gave his famous speech in which he implored Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” I’m going to paraphrase his history-altering quote and urge today’s business leaders to tear down these walls! Which walls? The ones that get in the way of cross-communication within organizations and prevent…

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Are You Engaging? Funny, smart, and easy to dance with is not enough these days

You may be funny, smart, and easy to dance with, but if you are not engaging employees on an ongoing basis, all of your work in developing a strategic plan will be for naught. In my last two blogs, we talked about informing and inspiring employees during implementation of the strategic plan. The last piece…

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How to Avoid “Hitting the Wall” in Your Strategic Plan

I focus a lot of my time and energy on helping clients remember the importance of ongoing communications as their strategic plan unfolds. Keeping employees informed on a regular basis helps to keep the finish line in sight and ensures that everyone runs the same race. But getting from where you are now to where…

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Five Steps to Breaking the Multitasking Cycle

Is constant multitasking wearing you down and eroding your effectiveness as a business leader? Here are five steps for recapturing your time, attention and productivity: 1. Focus. Focus starts with having a very clear definition of what winning looks like for your organization. Be as specific as possible. What will it look like at the…

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Multitasking: Hit or Myth?

Have you ever watched someone attempting to do several things at once in the workplace? Their energy level is high, they’re constantly in motion, and they look like the kind of worker every organization wants to have. But if you look closer you can see they’re not accomplishing much. Or else they’re getting it done…

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Are We Short-Changing our Middle Managers?

Every once in a while you run across a statistic or bit of information that really makes you sit up and take notice. Here’s the latest one for me. According to the ASTD (American Society for Training & Development), the ranks of middle managers have significantly declined over the past two years while their responsibilities…

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Time for a Strategic Planning Makeover

When it comes to organizational sacred cows, strategic planning sits very close to the top of the list for most organizations. We all know the drill. Take the senior management team off-site for a weekend. Evaluate last year’s performance. Conduct the basic SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Set some goals for the upcoming…

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Guest Blog: The Inevitability of Change

I would like to personally thank Richard Derwent Cooke for being our guest blogger this week. Check out his website to learn more: I-Change.biz I was listening to someone talk the other day and they referred to “the inevitability of change”, and it was a phrase that really resonated for me. So often I hear…

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