Condensing four decades of lessons learned into a 45 minute webcast is proving to be an invigorating challenge. A few months ago I stepped back for a long and broad look at hundreds of keynotes, workshops, and retreats we’ve delivered across a full range of industries and organizations in many countries. This led to a […]
Read post »One of the “7 Reasons Change and Development Programs Fail” is a partial and piecemeal approach to implementing programs like engagement, customer service, succession planning, safety, performance management, talent management, lean/six sigma, and IT. Our “compass model” has evolved from culture development work with dozens of organizations. It’s often used during Leadership Team Retreats for […]
Read post »Balancing management and leadership has been a focus of our work stretching back through many of my books and our keynotes and workshops and leadership team retreats. Zenger Folkman’s research on the “differentiating competencies” that separate the bottom 10% from the top 10% shows that emotional intelligence is a major factor in leadership effectiveness. Good […]
Read post »Last month I delivered a one hour webinar on How Learning and Development Can Build Stronger Leaders and Cultures (click on title to view it) sponsored by The Institute for Performance and Learning (formerly the Canadian Society for Training and Development). During the webinar we ran a poll on the research and best practices presented. […]
Read post »With over 500 sites from many countries tuned to our one hour webcast last week it’s clear that Leading a Peak Performance Culture is a topic with lots of interest. You can now view the full archived webcast by clicking here. During this fast-paced session I gave a high altitude, jet speed overview of a […]
Read post »Southwest Airlines has not only been the most financially successful airline in history it has also produced the #1 return to investors of all S&P 500 publicly traded companies for a 30 year period. Herb Kelleher, co-founder, Chairman Emeritus, and former CEO declares, “it’s the intangibles that are the hardest things for competitors to imitate. […]
Read post »Wells Fargo is now America’s largest bank by market capitalization. One of Zenger Folkman’s early and largest Clients, the company has been working extensively on leadership and culture development for the past decade. CEO John Stumpf observed, “We always say we could leave our strategic plan on an airplane, somebody could pick it up, and […]
Read post »Our research shows that leadership self-assessment correlates to performance outcomes like employee engagement, turnover, safety, customer service, or profitability only half as reliably as ratings from everyone else (manager, direct reports, peers, and others). Some leaders rate themselves much higher than all the other raters. Other leaders don’t see their own strengths and assess their […]
Read post »We have seen a dramatic increase in the use of coaching as a tool for leadership development over the past few years. And for good reason…the list of benefits is impressive: improved productivity high-energy company culture dynamic supervisor/employee relationships creative problem solving greater risk taking heightened innovation, and higher levels of customer service and satisfaction […]
Read post »Ironically, in today’s age of instantaneous communication and technologies that have made us a global village, communication breakdowns are the single biggest complaint we hear from our Clients. It’s a complex issue with both cause and effect tightly intertwined. In many cases, people don’t have the skills to address tough issues with each other. And […]
Read post »Customer service and quality is highly talked about and rarely delivered. Consequently, many companies pay a high “marketing tax” to counteract damaged brand perceptions and bad buzz from poor customer service. Part of the problem is because service/quality is a very slippery concept. It’s exasperatingly difficult to define and a source of great confusion to […]
Read post »Focusing on Strengths and Not Weaknesses Tricia is preparing for a performance review meeting with Tom. She’s very happy with his work and sees lots of potential for him to grow further in his role and move up to higher leadership roles. Tom is a strong communicator, good at building relationships, and inspires his direct […]
Read post »Many organizations have increased their efforts to strengthen the coaching skills of their supervisors, managers, and executives. That’s because of mounting evidence showing that coaching effectiveness dramatically improves employee engagement, levels of customer satisfaction, productivity, safety, and profitability while reducing turnover, absenteeism, and costs. Coaching skills have an especially vital impact on “volunteerism.” This is […]
Read post »I am publishing just one blog post this week as I enjoy holiday relaxation with family and friends. So I’ve packed this blog post with enough resources to last the week! Here is a recap of our most popular resources over the past year. I hope you’ll have a little extra time over the holidays […]
Read post »As shown in the extensive research of our web site section, Focusing on Strengths, we have overwhelming evidence that building strengths is 2 to 3 times more effective than fixing weaknesses, closing gaps, or “rounding out” lower leadership skills. But when a weaker leadership skill crosses the line into fatal flaw territory the “horns effect” […]
Read post »Last week I delivered a fast-paced webcast addressing the serious talent gap impeding many organizations. As I outlined at the beginning of the webcast, research shows: • 70% of executives think their organization lacks adequate bench strength. • 97% of organizations report serious leadership gaps — 40% say these are severe. • 65 to 75% […]
Read post »After listening to an angry customer vent his dissatisfaction with the organization’s service, a supervisor replied, “If it’s any consolation to you, we treat our employees worse than we treat our customers.” You’ve heard it said that no one can serve two masters. In too many organizations with their traditional top down hierarchy, that means […]
Read post »Labor Day was celebrated yesterday in Canada and the U.S. “dedicated to the social and economic achievements of workers.” Last week’s story of how fired CEO Arthur T. Demoulas was reinstated in his role by force of his employees’ fierce loyalty to him contains a powerful leadership lesson. Demoulas was fired as head of New […]
Read post »Would you like to move beyond building individual leaders to building a culture of exceptional leadership and coaching in your organization? Are you concerned about succession planning, deepening leadership bench strength, cultivating teamwork, recruiting top talent, increasing retention and engagement, improving customer service, safety and wellness, and increasing sales and profits? These critical issues are […]
Read post »Coaching skills development has become a major concern for many organizations. And for good reason. Leaders with extraordinary coaching skills create 8 times higher employee engagement, 2.5 times higher job satisfaction, 3 times more willingness to “go the extra mile,” half as many employees thinking about quitting, and dramatically higher levels of customer service and […]
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