Want to produce results fast, minimize risk of failure, perfect a concept and create demand for more? Pick a pilot, improve results and replicate. Increasingly, organizations are adopting surgical approaches to improving performance, focusing on targeted segments (a branch office, manufacturing plant, laboratory, sales territory, or distribution center), making significant shifts quickly, creating stories around… Read more
Performance Management
Resolve to Form a New Habit
It’s a new year. Time for testing those personal improvement resolutions that we set for ourselves. Sometimes they are easy, sometimes more challenging, and sometimes we write a list of things we never intend to follow through anyway. But what about professional resolutions? What can you resolve to improve in your career during 2019? CEOs… Read more
Leading in Tumultuous Times
Managing through tumultuous times is often the equivalent of a high-wire balancing act. The disruption is a source of anxiety and uncertainty for people inside the organization. If linking people to strategy represents a major challenge in normal times, creating linkage during a downsizing, merger or reorganization raises the challenge exponentially. In tumultuous times, communication… Read more
Measure What Matters
What gets measured gets done. Even though we’ve heard that a gazillion times, many organizations are still managing the wrong measures. Consequently, they’re getting the wrong results. Too many leaders today don’t give enough thought to what they’re measuring. The leader of a large U.S operation once suggested that training should be measured by how… Read more
Back at the Office
It’s one thing to listen to a speaker. It’s another thing to do something about what you learned when you return to the office—assuming the speaker said something worth doing. Last week I delivered three presentations to communication professionals attending a world conference in Washington, D.C. One was a three-hour workshop focused on reinventing the… Read more
Doing These Five Things Will Add More Value To Your Job
Why are you continuing to push out information when shifting your focus to where communication process breaks down can add so much more value? Internal communication functions have enormous opportunities to change their role from activity producing cost centers to results generating value creators. How does your communication function make the shift—from sending out news… Read more
Mixing a Powerful Results Cocktail
There’s a tremendous amount of stress today on organizations to communicate well. The pace of change continues to escalate, putting pressure on people and teams to move the right information quickly, accurately, clearly and in multiple directions. Earlier this year, I discussed how we addressed a client’s poor performance using two different solutions. One was… Read more
What’s in it for Me?
Employee engagement isn’t just liking or responding to something as it is in social media talk. Employee engagement is a condition which, if properly directed, can significantly improve organizational performance such as quality, service, sales or safety. People can be engaged to do good things or bad things. Employee engagement needs to be directed. In… Read more
Information Is Critical to Peak Performance
A recent Leadership Report discussed employee engagement and specific conditions that need to be met for people to achieve peak performance. Those conditions are: Line of sight, or the ability to connect my work to results I can affect; Autonomy and involvement, or my ability to take action needed to improve results; Information sharing (there… Read more
Business Strategy Drives Communication Strategy
Communication measures must be aligned with an organization’s measures. Why should the two entities work at what could be cross purposes? Communication should be managed to improve results that the company, its customers and ultimately shareholders care about? And, it needs to do so with an acceptable return on investment, meaning the cost to create… Read more