Is Your Company Trustworthy
When something bad happens at your company, do you slink away and hide from the conflict or instead do you meet adversity head on with a smile and commitment to make things right? In other words, do your actions engender low trust or high trust? Each employee’s behavior determines overall trustworthiness of a company, but…
Reduce Employee Turnover by Protecting the Team – Part II
Last week’s message had a theme drawing from Coach Pete Carroll’s #1 rule of Always Protecting the Team; and it provided a 30,000 foot overview for how companies can reduce employee turnover by developing a set of shared values and rewarding desired behaviors, while creating leaders at all levels of the organization. This week, I’ll…
Reducing Employee Turnover by Protecting the Team – Part I
Always protect the team is Coach Pete Carroll’s #1 rule and it can apply in your company too; that is if you have a team worth protecting. The reality is that sustaining a successful service business is impossible without developing an engaged and effective team of employees that live by a shared value system. What…
When Wrong Leads to Right
What happens when customers have a bad buying experience with your company? Does the company brand take a hit when unhappy customers tell 10 of their friends why your company sucks? Or, is your team able to consistently convert a customer’s frown into a smile by following a simple process to transform wrong into right?…
Refining the Strategic Planning Process
This is the time of year that companies go through their annual strategic planning and budgeting process. While effective at tracking revenue goals and managing operating expenses, most strategic plans and budgets are not engineered to produce organizational behavior changes that ultimately increase the value of your company. How does your company measure up? Opportunity…
What Are Your Options
You wake up each morning with choices to make. Will your day be positive or negative? Will your clients have a positive or negative experience? Will you encourage or discourage your employees? Will your company take steps towards becoming more profitable or less profitable? Doing nothing is also a choice because this path eventually leads…
How to Reduce Employee Turnover
What is your business strategy for reducing employee turnover? What investments are in the annual budget for improving hiring practices, strengthening team effectiveness/productivity and building a vibrant company culture? Depending on whose study you believe, the cost of employee turnover is anywhere between 40% and 400% of an employee’s annual compensation. By anyone’s calculation, that’s…
Will You Leave a Legacy Company
What would happen if you suddenly were no longer able to run your company; whether due to long-term disability or death? Yeah that’s a pretty morbid question but last week, a guy I’ve known for over 20 years who owned a business with about 50 employees suddenly died at the age of 47 and now…
Why People Fail to Act on Their Instincts
Most friction inside a company can be traced to a specific employee or group of employees. More often than not, addressing the problem head-on takes way too long. For a company and its employees, the cost of doing nothing is expensive and painful; both financially and emotionally. Why does this happen? Paralysis by analysis is…
How to Improve the Budgeting and Reporting Process Effortlessly
Many companies go through an annual budgeting process that in theory aligns with a yearly strategic planning retreat. More often than not, the process takes forever, is painful to go through and ultimately is not very useful to the leadership or management team. Does this sound familiar? Avoid the most dangerous words in the business…