Leading At The Next Level

Getting into developing a mentorship mindset, as well as establishing some disciplines around gaining mentorship in your life and providing mentorship to others, is crucial. This circle of mentorship can truly be The Difference Maker for you and those around you in numerous ways. How do you cultivate the mindset that mentoring makes a difference? Hopefully, you are both mentoring and being mentore...

We've know Phillip Read for more than a decade but we've had the pleasure of building a strong friendship with him since he accepted the Chief of Police role in Bridgewater, VA in September of 2021 and having his as a member of our Executive Leadership Elite Think Tank since January of 2022. Chief Read brings significant experience with a demonstrated history of working in the government administr...

Daniel N. Jones is currently an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada Reno (UNR) and a core faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Social Psychology Program. Prior to UNR, Dr. Jones was an Assistant Professor of Legal Psychology at the University of Texas, El Paso. He received his BS in psychology from Stockton University and his Ph. D. in Social...

If we want to have a shot at capturing the profitability that’s killed by confusion in our organizations by providing our teams with the kind of clear expectations they desperately need in order to produce excellent results, it will require a very focused effort! We must become experts in providing our team and each individual team member with extreme clarity as to the results we need from them an...

The cost of confusion hits our bottom line in many ways: increased downtime clarifying details, quality errors (regardless of our industry or process), delayed deliveries, and even lost customers. All of those things kill profitability! When we think about the statement I shared from Nicki Rankin’s LinkedIn article, “Managers are tasked with productivity and numbers for their department or divisio...

Make no mistake; confusion contributes to several of the profitability killers we’ve looked at already, so much so that I believe it’s critical we take a focused look at it individually as well! Whether it’s through the lack of clear expectations that we touched on when we worked through the High-Risk Areas early on, the importance of maintaining high expectations that I covered when addressing ho...

With an understanding of how impactful this profitability killer is to our organizations, it’s time we look at the steps we can take as leaders to drive employee engagement and eliminate the costs of a disengaged workforce. Make no mistake here: the productivity improvement that’s said to come from increased engagement is just one of the areas where we’ll capture profit… I’m so convinced that empl...

By this point, we should have a solid understanding of how much profitability is being killed in our respective organizations by just an average number of employees who aren’t actively engaged. But knowing the issue exists and having a plan for addressing it are two VERY different things! We’ll wrap up this look at the cost of disengaged employees with a few very practical steps any leader can tak...

Once we’ve been intentional about creating a culture of top-down leadership that provides effective communication on an ongoing basis and we’ve worked to minimize the profitability that’s killed by high voluntary turnover and ongoing recruiting, the next—but indeed no less critical—profitability killer that needs our attention is the cost of disengaged employees. To have any real shot at doing tha...

Any way we slice it, recruiting great candidates to join our team comes with a price tag! When we’re forced to recruit constantly because the business is growing, it’s hard enough—especially in a world where those great candidates are hard to come by. But suppose our voluntary turnover is an issue, and we haven’t provided the best team members we did have with a solid reason to stay. In that case,...

Earlier, I mentioned starting a job on March 12, 1996, that I thought would get me through college and how much that organization invested into hiring forty of the one thousand or so candidates who applied. I didn’t share how much of that investment came during the first two weeks we were on the payroll. The company certainly had a lot of time and money tied up in the process before we ever set fo...

Having just wrapped up our look at how high turnover kills so much of an organization’s profitability, it makes sense to shift our focus to the costs involved with recruiting. If we can provide our best team members with a solid reason to stay, the pressure to add anyone with a pulse to the team should be nearly nonexistent. But any time we have to fill a critical role, attracting great candidates...

Now that we’ve identified some of the causes of turnover, specifically the reasons great team members leave an organization voluntarily and the high costs associated with that voluntary turnover, and we’ve looked at the extended reach of those costs, let’s address this profitability killer by providing those folks with a reason to stay! As we wrap up this look at the high cost of turnover, I will...

The high cost of turnover shows up on a balance sheet because it’s a considerable profitability killer. Still, a company’s bank account isn’t the only thing that takes a hit when great team members are making conscious decisions to jump ship! Just as top-down leadership and poor communication play a part in so many other areas of how a business operates, high voluntary turnover impacts far more th...

Over the last several years, I’ve frequently referenced this study: According to a Gallup study, “The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that the U.S. voluntary turnover rate is 23.4% annually. It’s generally estimated that replacing an employee costs a business one-half to five times that employee’s annual salary. So, if 25% of a business’ workforce leaves and the average pay is $35,000, i...

Once we’ve come to terms with just how high the cost of poor communication can be and how any poor communication skills in our organizations add fuel to other fires that are killing our profitability, we have plenty of reason to address the lack of communication between our managers and employees. Let’s be honest, though: if doing it were as simple as saying it, would there be any need to discuss...

The cost of poor communication is impacting enough organizations that it’s become quite a hot topic. I found a separate article on Inc.com called “Costs of Poor Communication Reach $37 Billion. Avoid Disconnects by Implementing These Two Things” that referenced the same study I shared before, citing the average loss of $62.4 million per year to the 400 companies for 100k employees. Still, this Inc...

If we’re serious enough about capturing our best return to invest the energy into building a leadership culture that starts from the top and cascades throughout our organization, we’ll have a solid start toward achieving quantifiable results in addressing our profitability killers. And when we do, we can expect that to impact every other individual issue that’s been eating away at the profitabilit...

Several years ago, I asked a client struggling to attract and retain good team members why they treated their customers so well but didn’t extend that same treatment to their employees. This client, the company’s owner, told me he paid his employees to do what he told them, so that’s what he expected. He also said his customers were paying him, so they deserved to be treated differently. I immedia...

If we want to have an exponential impact, there’s no other option than to buy into the idea that it all starts at the top! While there will certainly still be plenty of hard days, changing our approach will be one of the most critical things we do in addressing our profitability killers—especially in the highest-risk areas! In mid-2018, Cindy and I had decided to build an “executive summit” onto t...

For more than twenty years now, I’ve heard John Maxwell emphasize that “EVERYTHING rises and falls on leadership.” I even remember when Uncle Ben gave similar counsel to Peter Parker, aka Spiderman, saying, “With great power comes great responsibility!” If we really want to impact those things that are killing our profitability, especially in the highest risk areas, and achieve actual quantifiable...

With the importance of a “realistic, clear-eyed, complete assessment of the current state” in mind, I’ll challenge you to get really honest with yourself… Do you have that clarity for your current costs in areas like turnover, productivity, or downtime? And I mean the total costs involved, not just the simple ones that show up when you submit an expense report. If you’ve taken those numbers seriou...

Over the last several years, I’ve seen more and more references—through basically every media channel I pay attention to with ties to the overall workforce—to the importance of soft skills. More often than not, though, these references are generalizations tied to management and executive level roles, with qualifying comments like this from a recent article on Forbes.com, “Soft skills generally ref...

High-Risk Areas An article I found from Management-Issues.com opened: “Listen up, I will say this only once. Misunderstandings between workers and managers cost firms $37bn a year, yet few firms trouble to do anything about it.” Another Society for Human Resource Management article cited Debra Hamilton as estimating these costs to “companies of 100 employees at an average of $420,000 per year.” Wh...

Over the last twenty years, I’ve developed an intense appreciation for world-class chiropractic care. Don’t jump ship on me here... Hear me out! I’m not referring to the Homer Simpsons of the industry who we’d never need to tell “less yacking and more cracking.” I’m talking about the absolute experts in the field who are genuinely dialed in on identifying the underlying issues causing the problem...