This week’s book review is Start with Why by Simon Sinek
This is an excellent book that every person should read. Although it is especially relevant to business leaders, it applies to each of our personal lives as well!
Tag Archives: organization
How Strong Values Engage Employees and Increase Profits
12 Steps to Business Transformation – Step 3
Over the last few posts, I introduced my Ebook 12 Steps to Business Transformation and I defined Vision and Mission, the first 2 steps of the 12 transformational steps. This week we are going to talk about Values.
Defining the Values for your business is step 3 in my new Ebook “12 Steps to Business Transformation.”
Values describe the behaviors that will get you from where you are now to achieving your Mission and ultimately attaining the Vision.
Where Vision defines WHY your organization exists and Mission defines WHAT the organization does, Values are the driving behaviors that govern HOW the organization drives toward successful outcomes.
Values are the foundation of any organization.
How to Get the Pulse of Your Organization – Part II
Back in May 2014, I wrote a blog post entitled How to Get the Pulse of Your Organization. In this post I described two techniques that can be used to effectively communicate and lead your organization; “Did You Know” emails and a web based employee feedback system. In this week’s article, I will introduce two other techniques that I used to communicate and keep my finger on the organization’s pulse.
- Monthly lunch with the leader – Pick a random set of employees each month to have lunch with you. Do not repeat employees until everyone in the organization gets a turn. A group size of 10 to 20 works best. Use these lunches as open mic sessions for employees to ask you whatever questions they may have. Be open and honest with your answers and wherever possible tie the answers back to the organization’s vision, mission, values and goals. Above all else, listen intently to the feedback, take notes and never get defensive. These sessions are your opportunity to hear what your organization is thinking and talking about. If the conversation starts out slowly, you can prompt discussion by asking questions like;
Why Are You So Focused On Your Competition?
“The competitor to be feared is the one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.” Henry Ford
I find it very interesting that about 100 years ago Henry Ford, the inventor of the mass production factory, understood that focusing on your competition added no value to your business. In fact, he knew that focusing on your competition takes your focus off your own business. Focusing on the competition causes you to chase others rather than leading your organization towards achieving your goals, mission and vision.
So if Mr. Ford identified the secret about what to focus on as a business leader 100 years ago, why are so many business leaders today so concerned about what their competition is doing?
How to Get The Pulse of Your Organization
In several past posts, Do You Suffer From Continuous Partial Attention Syndrome? and Focused and Clear Communications, I wrote about the speed of communications and how complicated everything can be in today’s “over-connected’ world. As a business leader, there are a number of techniques that can be used to cut through the noise and effectively communicate and lead your organization. I am only going to talk about two techniques here in this post but I will add others in the future.
The first tool that I have found to be very effective is something called “Did you know . . . “ emails.