The Power of Positivity in Customer Service
I’ve been focusing a lot on customer service these days, and the impact it has on buyer loyalty. While there’s most likely a marketing guru out there with piles of data on this subject, I prefer to share examples from my personal experience. Recently, I’ve had a few encounters with excellent employees that have cemented…
A Year for the Books: My 2019 Reading List
If you’re a life-long learner like I am, chances are your “must-read” list gets longer with each year. It seems like there’s never enough time to get to everything, but in 2019 I’m proud to say I was able to do a solid amount of reading. Below, you’ll find a list of my favorite non-fiction…
Not Great, Not Terrible: How to Handle Middle Performing Employees
We know what to do with our rock star employees. We show them the love. We also know what to do with our worst employees. We show them the door. But what should we do with middle performing employees? Sometimes they have moments of brilliance that leave you thinking, “They’re okay. Let’s keep working with…
A Tale of Two Cars: Customer Service Matters
Our family recently decided that I needed to trade in our two cars. One car was mine, the other was my wife’s; both were getting high in miles. I purchased two different types of cars from two separate dealerships. Though I purchased a good car from each dealer, my experiences could not have been more…
Why I Wrote the Book
On November 5, I released How to Fix a Factory, my first book. It shares some of the things I’ve learned during my decades-long career, focused on how to get a struggling organization back on the road to health and vitality. Writing it was a journey. Getting from an idea to a finished product took…
Why The Words We Use Matter
What we say and how we say it matters. Our words reflect not only what we think but also how we feel. It can take practice, but I’ve learned that listening carefully to the words someone uses can tell you a lot about them. Low-Respect v. High-Respect Let’s look at an example of how a…
Talent System Series, Part Five: An Onboarding Program That Works
If you’ve been following along with this Talent Systems blog series, you’ll know I offered a brief introduction of what Talent Systems are, and subsequently covered how to assess talent brand status, manage your talent pipeline strategy, and make sure your screening and hiring process is efficient. Now we’ll move on to the next important…
Talent System Series, Part Four: Make Your Screening & Hiring Process Efficient
I’ve covered the steps detailing a company’s talent brand status and determining a plan of action for a talent pipeline. Now it’s time to move on to the next crucial step in the Talent System Series: the screening and hiring process. Screening and hiring are challenging. It’s a process to accomplish two things that are…
Talent System Series, Part Three: Your Talent Pipeline Strategy
As I discussed in my last blog post, establishing a workforce you can be proud of starts from within by assessing your company’s talent brand status. Once you’ve done that, the next step is determining the strategy behind your Talent Pipeline. Determine Your Talent Pipeline The term “Talent Pipeline” is shorthand for the target population…
Talent System Series, Part Two: Assessing Your Talent Brand Status
We often think of a company’s logo and color scheme as representing its brand, but brand is much more than aesthetics. It represents people’s impression and thoughts about your company—what is called brand status. A company’s reputation is everything in a highly competitive market. When beginning the process of recruiting and hiring talented workers, ask…