Finding motivated, engaged, and high quality employees is very paramount to the success of any organization. Employees like this truly make the workplace great. With COVID-19, it’s important that we pay more attention to how we can sustain a healthy, growth-minded culture. This pandemic has led to additional work and personal stressors for our employees.  Many employees are still working from home, alongside their spouse and children. People are being pulled in so many different directions and feeling as if, at times, they can do nothing right as they try to balance their work and family life. It's important to…

A common subject that comes up when facilitating strategic planning are the metrics that a business should measure regularly. What's the right number of metrics to have? How often should you measure them? Am I measuring a certain metric correctly? How can I best set my business up for success? When arriving at the right answer for you, here's a few things to consider: 1. The value of metrics. A great metric is one that sets a point where either corrective action is taken, or no action is taken. Therefore, that attention is directed somewhere else. Focusing your resources in…

By now you have been through the shock of the world literally seeming like it changed overnight. You have adapted to this “new norm”.  Whether you like it or not, this change could be with us for 12 to 18 months. Some areas of business may never fully change back.  Successful organizations have increased communications, pivoted with new innovations, cut costs, became more efficient, and surely have changed in a world where most people simply don’t like change. Even if your business has skyrocketed during these unpredictable times, you may be wondering when your industry will soften.  We all need…

Times like these bring some of the most unique changes we will see in businesses. The dotcom age, 9/11, and the economic reform of 2008 were major moments of regrouping, changing, and coming out more positive in the end. Now more than ever, leadership is very essential for unifying businesses, especially as we face a moral debate of the COVID-19 epidemic. I handled 2001 differently than I should have for my company. However, I learned from my mistakes and ended up leading us through the 2008 crisis more effectively. We ended up coming out stronger than ever as a business!…

It’s strategic planning season again! While you envision to make 2020 you best year ever, don’t forget a couple essential exercises to your planning. These two smaller steps are not commonly done by businesses, but they can be argued as most essential! Please use this article as a step-by-step guide to easily implementing these steps. Step 1: Engage select staff beyond your leadership team in your strategic planning. It’s easy to do this. The following ways are different parts of strategic planning that they should be involved in. First, have them contribute to the SWOT you create. Your staff knows…

Early in my career I really struggled with managing my time.  There simply was never enough time in the day for me to help in all the areas that needed it. —or that I thought needed it.     I was the CEO and co-founder of a growing aerospace business called EMTEQ. My day would consist of checking over 200 emails, returning phone calls, and working through a task list that never ended. Some of these tasks consisted of handling the day to day management to make sure things got done, problems got solved, and that all stakeholders were taken care of.   Sound…

Business coaches will typically tell owners that they should work more “on” their business instead of “in” it. As businesses grow, the major limiting factor becomes the leader’s bandwidth and ability to do this. Eventually, they can no longer do the heavily lifting on their own. In order to overcome this, we promote the idea of creating a “culture of growth” within the organization. This culture comes alive when staff is engaged with driving growth. However, this idea is abstract in nature. Here is a simple guide that breaks down this idea into mechanical steps that create habits necessary to…

One of the key roles of a business leader is to engender trust amongst their team. One exercise that we recommend to do this is called Stop/Start/Continue. Stop/Start/Continue helps to build trust by having each participant communicate what each other needs to stop doing, start doing, and continue doing in order to achieve the business plan. Instead of seeing this activity as one to judge or criticize other leaders, see it as a way to drive constructive communication and trust. Start/Stop/Continue is used to help everyone be more successful, which will lead to the growth of the business. Start/Stop/Continue Exercise…