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In the topic 'Organization Improvement'


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Keys to Delivering Outstanding Service and Quality Levels

Last week we sent out the Improvement Point below to subscribers. “Despite all the talk – passionate speeches, glossy brochures, clever ads, high tech videos, convincing sales pitches, snappy slogans, strategic plans, and solemn annual reports – the service and quality action delivered by most organizations is mediocre at best.” – from Jim Clemmer’s article, […]

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“Extraordinary Vision” Audio Interview now Available for Download

On May 19 I was interviewed for a one hour teleconference by Shelley MacDougall and Kevin MacDonald. Shelley and Kevin have created a program (mainly for the private club industry) called the Extraordinary Leader. It is a tele-class and web-based community with the focus of developing Extraordinary Leaders. This year-long program is divided into twelve […]

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From Casual to Moderate to Intense Levels of Service

A workshop attendee recently visited our web site article library and read “Casual, Moderate, and Intense Levels of Customer/Partner Focus.”. She sent me an e-mail asking for further insights to the intense level of service I highlighted in that chart. She also wanted ideas on how to accomplish this on a smaller scale within a […]

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Change Your Meetings and Change Your Culture

Continuing the theme of meetings, here’s a great list of suggestions from Seth Godin’s March 27, 2009 blog post, “Getting serious about your meeting problem.” : • Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length? • Schedule meetings […]

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Meetings Showcase Organizational Culture

Last week’s blog on Engage Younger Workers or Bore and Lose Them got me thinking further about how meetings most clearly showcase the organizational or even division/department’s mini-culture. I was running a two-day offsite planning retreat recently where the disconnect between the culture the leadership team wanted to build and their group behavior was huge. […]

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More Reflections on Personal Purpose and Living in the Moment

In one of last week’s blog postings I featured a reflective comment from Gregory Knight, Department Head, Laboratory Services, U.S. Navy, that he posted at the bottom of my article “True to Our Souls.”Click here to read it..” That prompted Linda Morelli, Michael Darmody, and Ravi Tangri to add their insightful thoughts and feedback to […]

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Reflections on Personal Purpose and Living in the Moment

It’s been happening so regularly I shouldn’t be so surprised when it happens yet again. I am talking about the “coincidence” of encounters or correspondence while I am working on something along those very lines. Last week I was finishing the manuscript to my latest book. It’s an extension and significant build upon the approaches […]

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We Need Lots More Innovation

Like the weather, many people talk about innovation but few managers do much about it. Unlike the weather, there is a lot managers can and must do about innovation – especially in difficult times. Innovation often falls into the same trap as strategic planning, economic forecasting, and change management. There is no orderly path that […]

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Defining and Living Organizational Values

The CLEMMER Group has been working with the Canadian division of an internationally owned services business. The company has been in Canada for just ten years and growing very rapidly. Early in our consulting to this company, we started working with them to define and more effectively shape their organizational culture, after one of the […]

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The Deadly Search for the Right Path to Process Management

I received an e-mail from a reader who was recently promoted into a process improvement coordinator role working with their management team. He asked me for the right path to begin. The root of this kind of question is what has caused so much of the fad surfing and rigid off-the-shelf programs that have messed […]

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It’s Often About Processes Not People

Experiences in the past few months are clearly trying to tell me to review the keys to process management in this issue. Problems with processes have featured prominently in a number of my workshops and management retreats. Much of the ongoing consulting and organizational coaching work we’re doing at The CLEMMER Group is currently centered […]

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Tips for Setting Team or Organizational Goals and Priorities

Ensure you’re following the three keys to effective goals and priorities: 1) Follow-up; 2) Follow-up; and 3) Follow-up. Continuously communicate how your strategic imperatives connect to your vision, values, and purpose. Set goals and priorities from the outside (customers) in and help everyone see the big picture and where they fit in it. Keep the […]

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Setting and Cascading Goals for Increased Effectiveness

High-performing organizations like Toyota have developed and evolved a very disciplined methodology that they call “Hoshin kanri.” It starts with high level or strategic imperatives and then cascades these through every part of the organization. Follow-through and follow-up is the key to moving this process from just another bolt-on planning program to a built-in management […]

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How Team Building Exercises Can Be Harmful

Here’s an e-mail I received from a regular web site visitor and subscriber to my monthly newsletter. My response follows: “I am an ardent reader of your articles. The latest improvement point article on Team Development is indeed good. The only point where I disagree is where you have brushed aside the adventure games as […]

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Fixing Performance Review Systems – Most are a Disaster

Most performance review systems are a disaster. They’re a perfect example of a great idea – getting team leader and team member together periodically to review what’s work and what’s not and make plans for continuous improvement – that has become a bureaucratic “fill in the forms” exercise. They are demotivating and degrading in most […]

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Navigating the Slippery Slope of Accountability

I am an administrator for a mid-sized professional services firm in a division of employees under the direction of a director. The director claims that his staff has been empowered to do their jobs. But nowhere in the discussion is there ever any mention of accountability (which I believe goes hand in hand with empowerment). […]

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Customer Focus is Finally Returning

When I wrote my second book, Firing on All Cylinders: The Service/Quality System for High-Powered Corporate Performance in the early nineties, customer service and quality improvement was becoming a key focal point for both the public and private sectors. Movements like Total Quality Management, Continuous Quality Improvement, and related customer service initiatives were helping many […]

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Do You Have a Dysfunctional, Average, or High-Performing Culture?

Here’s a quickie quiz I put together for my new Breaking Through the Bull workshop. It draws on our Consulting and Training division’s growing experience with assessing and helping our Client’s shift their culture. It also frames many of the issues Pete Leonard (the fictional manager in my new book, Moose on the Table: A […]

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Health and Safety Program Versus Culture

Building on the highly customized Courageous Leadership for Health & Safety training program we designed for Barrick Gold (see July 2006, December 2006, and December 2007 issues – The CLEMMER Group’s training and consulting division has been rapidly expanding our offerings and expertise in this area. As word of the dramatic results of Barrick’s program […]

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Powerful Proof That Leaders Are Made, Not Born

For over thirty years I’ve believed to the core of my being that high performers are made, not born. Otherwise I would have given up long ago! When I was a sales trainer with Culligan Water Conditioning back in the seventies I wrote a fictitious (and facetious) series of birth and death announcements making fun […]

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