Does Your Firm Have the Spirit of Engagement

When you walk through the halls of your organization do you see and hear the positive hum of employees collaborating to propel the business forward, or lots of closed doors and an isolated collection of despondent souls, hunched over email with their back to their cubicle entrance, the silence punctuated only with brief fits of anger, frustration and discouragement?

Every good leader wants productive, motivated people who are committed to moving the company forward. Even the best efforts are more often rewarded with confusion, apathy, good intentions, and poor execution. And as far as seeing the kind of energy and enthusiasm that denotes genuine motivation? Well, that’s rarer than the proverbial hen’s teeth.

Eliminate Your Change Management Challenges with These Two Powerful Techniques

Strategy is about deciding what to do, execution is about getting it done. Leaders have to be able to demonstrate both, but all too often people-based change management issues derail execution. It’s not enough to just know “what” needs to happen – the commitment and support needs to be there from both the firm and its employees to provide the “how” that helps make it happen.

Here’s the #1 Way to Create WOW Customer Experiences

As a consumer and a business person, you’re literally having hundreds of customer experiences every day – stop for a moment and just think about all the people and businesses you’ve interacted with today. Many of these are nothing more than bland encounters. Too many are truly horrific, where the individual you’re trying to do business with is not only disinterested and uncaring, but downright difficult and obstructive. Too few business interactions are truly a pleasure and worthy of note.

Here’s the One Simple Question That Eliminates Headaches and Boosts Profits as You Build Your Invaluable Team

How often do you find yourself asking “why don’t they get it?”, find yourself looking at a marginal employee and weighing the costs of keeping them vs. replacing them, or wonder where the “good” people are? It’s not uncommon for highly intelligent people to wrestle with making decisions about their people, because we all want to be fair and give them the benefit of the doubt. But doing so can have severely detrimental effects on the success of your organization.

How to Prevent Frenzy, Frazzle, Fog, and Fizzle from Derailing Your Best Strategies

How often do employees have the thinking time to come up with surprising new insights and value for the company beyond their everyday job? Could every manager tell you exactly what they are doing today to move their top 2-3 priorities forward? Could each employee in your company tell you exactly how they contribute to making the company profitable and successful, if you asked them? What proportion of you firm’s initiatives are competed as planned rather than abandoned midstream… and do they consistently deliver value?

Leverage Your Value Capital to Improve Profitability Now and In the Long Term

Every leader, in every organization, faces the same sole responsibility and fundamental challenge: how to make human, technological, and financial assets more valuable. Typically, technology and financial capital are relatively common amongst competing firms, and fail to serve as a strong point of differentiation. Value Capital ™, as defined below, is composed of the three assets that truly differentiate your firm from all others.

Quickly Boost Your Bottom Line with 6 Highly Effective Profit Levers You Can Pull Today

Over time, costs have a way of working their way into the system, even good initiatives become outdated, and market opportunities fail to be capitalized upon.

Yet seemingly minor opportunities to improve revenues and reduce costs across a customer base can add upp to big profits, especially in low-margin industries.

Taming the Organizational Octopus

The Outsourcing Institute estimates that companies are losing 38 cents on every dollar by engaging in “miscellaneous” activities. Each individual in the firm needs to be capable of working on high-value activities in a way that consistently moves the organization forward. The answer lies in clear communication of what each and every person is responsible for achieving, and in helping them build the talent to fulfill their role. That’s easier said than done, because its estimated that all of the “managerial” communication that goes on in most companies accounts for less than 1% of what employees are bombarded with in their everyday jobs. One of the most critical skills for contemporary leaders is “the how and the who”: the frameworks the leader puts in place to inspire, guide and motivate the actions of employees.

The Simple, Straightforward, and Overlooked Way to Get the Sludge Out of Your Operations

Just as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz was composed of a lot of different components that all needed to work smoothly together, so is your organization. And just as exposure to the elements caused the Tin Man to seize up, so too will organizations degrade over time and eventually become dysfunctional, without a concerted effort to keep them well-oiled. Service Quality, in its broadest sense, goes well beyond traditional “customer service” definitions. It means that every internal and external customer gets the support they need to do what they’re trying to do, quickly and easily. The Productivity aspect ensures that its’s done efficiently and effectively, which is what builds stakeholder value.