Being Heard: For many of us, the employees we hire are often referred to as “knowledge workers.” The most common definition of that term I’ve come across is, “Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge.” In other words, we hire knowledge workers and pay them to think. We hope that they are smarter than we are in whatever …
Do You Agree? Several reasonably consistent comments, in one form or another, are being made by business leaders. One is, “My employees treat our customers the way we treat our employees.” Another is, “Customers first is wrong. It’s employees first. Then the employees will take good care of our customers.” Also, of course, there’s the ancient mantra still spoken today, …
Playing it Safe According to Bill Taylor, founding editor of FastCompany magazine, playing it safe may be the riskiest path of all for your organization. Safety can be a trap, in that you never move forward. Two activities in my past are sailing and rock climbing. When a storm approaches, large ships move out to sea away from the rocks …
According to Gallup The numbers rarely change. In the U.S., the annual Gallup survey shows that about 70% of our employees are NOT engaged. Meaning, they are putting in no extra effort to move the company forward. Employee engagement is the engine of productivity. Job #1 The CEO, Founder, Owner of a company has one main job and that is …
Maxwell: Back in 2000, John Maxwell authored a book entitled Developing the Leader Within You. In that book, he posited that there are five levels of leadership. He named those levels Position, Permission, Production, People Development, and Pinnacle. In this post, I discuss the fourth of the five and we will explore the last level in our final post of …
Real World: Fresh out of engineering school and excited to begin my new job, I enthusiastically started work on test equipment design for a digital fuel-control. One of the more memorable experiences was working with the technician assigned to our team. He was (is?) a true craftsman. He built the circuit-boards we designed in a neat, logical, and efficient manner. …
In a previous post, we spoke about control and developing leaders. We stated that “Control isn’t control until you give it away.” If you are running a large organization or even a small “one person shop,” you will find it advantageous to have others thinking about new ways of doing things. We want suppliers, associates, affiliates and employees to get …
Things are changing rapidly. Not only are our workers younger, so are our customers. The accelerating pace of change means that to survive we will be updating, tweaking, throwing out and rebuilding our business models, processes and perceived “truths.” Yes, for many of us, our most cherished beliefs are being called into question. I’ve written elsewhere about how I think …
How giving workers autonomy at the NUMMI plant translated to quality manufacturing, here in the US with American workers using Toyota techniques.