I had a difficult experience this past week:
I had to practice what I preach. I had to listen to someone share her criticisms, suggestions, and proposed new procedures for an organization I have been heavily involved with for the past five years. And here's the tough part, I had to force myself ... Views: 770
The most common question I'm asked by new clients who are focusing on succession planning is:
"How do I start?"
It's a great question and its answer is one that many clients don't anticipate:
Start by having a very clear, well-developed strategic plan.
Needless to say, when new clients hear ... Views: 734
Have you ever gone into a store and had a heck of a time trying to find what you wanted? You finally had to have someone lead you to it because the store's signage was poor. Like me, you probably thought, "Why don't they just put up clear signage?"
Have you ever tried to reorder from one of your ... Views: 536
We've been doing a lot of work with clients lately on fine-tuning their marketing efforts. A crucial step in this process is getting crystal-clear on just who they want as customers. Now I know this sounds like a somewhat strange activity. But you'd be amazed at the number of businesses who ... Views: 625
Employee retention is a hot topic. Every employer knows it's terribly expensive, time consuming, and disruptive to operations to repeatedly recruit, hire, train, and then lose employees. There are many reasons employees leave their jobs. However, time and again, employees leave because of ... Views: 4624
I learned this week that a client started a program in which every manager is part of a team to help less-experienced staff learn basic project management techniques. Each team will identify and work on a project collaboratively. The overall intent is to not only enhance the project management ... Views: 568
We're working with several organizations helping them prepare their next tier of managers to eventually take over the senior leadership positions. However, before we focus on developing this next tier of managers, we spend a good bit of time working with the current senior leadership team to ... Views: 1252
This is going to sound a bit "touchy-feely", but one of the tricks in writing marketing copy and designing marketing pieces is to ensure the "subtle" side is addressed as well as the overt message. To help your prospective customers not only UNDERSTAND what you're selling, the prospects also ... Views: 412
We've all had this experience at least once in our professional lives: We've held off firing an employee because we didn't want to be mean. We didn't want to hurt the person's feelings, cause more disruption in his or her personal life, or we simply didn't want to have that difficult ... Views: 521
Hmmm, this is interesting. This meeting with the executive team was supposed to start at 9AM and here it is 9:05AM and no executives are in the board room yet. Oh wait, I hear someone coming. Let me get near the door so I can introduce myself as everyone comes in. Ah, here's the first ... Views: 917
A client recently asked me for guidance on how she should gauge her managers' understanding of their organization's strategic plan. She doesn't believe her managers fully appreciate how important their roles are in ensuring the plan succeeds. She fears they believe it is up to the executive ... Views: 695
A beautiful thing happened during a client work session this week: the management team experienced the value of clear, honest communication.
For some time this client has been under the incorrect assumption that its management team communicated well with each other. Yet invariably when I'd have ... Views: 711