Tag: leadership

Common sense ain’t so common

by Dan Oswald Have you ever known someone who was incredibly intelligent but had absolutely no common sense? I’ve known a few. So the other day when a colleague was describing to me a book he came across that contained “cowboy logic” and the line, “I’ve learned that common sense ain’t so common,” it got […]

Are Your Leaders Trained to Avoid These 4 Mistakes?

Leadership expert John Hamm, author of Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership (Jossey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint, February 2011, www.unusuallyexcellent.com ), has spent his career studying the practitioners of unusually excellent leadership via his work as a CEO, venture capitalist, board member, high-level consultant, and professor of leadership at the […]

Rules need not apply

by Dan Oswald Last month, Ryan Braun, the Milwaukee Brewers star who was the 2011 National League MVP, was hit with a 65-game suspension that ended his season for his use of banned substances provided by a Miami clinic accused of distributing banned performance-enhancing drugs to Major League Baseball players. This was after he had […]

Train Supervisors to Manage Challenging Employees

To review the four scenarios, click here. Here are the recommendations for dealing with these challenging employees as presented in one of the training exercises in the BLR® PowerPoint® training session, How to Manage Challenging Employees. GUIDANCE Sit down with the employee and examine each of his recent complaints. If a complaint has merit, ask […]

Do Your Supervisors Know How to Manage Challenging Employees?

Supervising other people is never easy, but some employees make it particularly difficult. Challenging employees can be a disruptive influence, damaging morale and making it difficult for their coworkers to function productively. It takes skillful management and patience to turn things around with difficult employees. “Skillful” is the operative word here. Most people aren’t born […]

Keeping the “I” out of “team”

by Dan Oswald I have the always desirable but elusive teamwork on my mind as I write this. The dictionary defines it this way: “cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause.” There’s a lot in that definition. […]

Train Employees to Share Innovations in the Community

Well-known for training its own employees on lean principles, Toyota partnered with the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation (EVSC) in Indiana to teach the school district how to make its process of collecting and distributing 14,000 netbooks to students in grades 6 through 12 more efficient. Since October 2012, members from the Toyota Production System Support […]

Are You Training Employees to Be Leaders in the Community?

Primary objectives for training employees are always to help them perform their jobs in the most efficient and productive way possible. But once those goals are well in hand, additional objectives can be beneficial to both your organization’s bottom line and its corporate reputation. Well-known for training its own employees on lean principles, Toyota partnered […]

customer

You won’t know what your customers want if you don’t ask

by Dan Oswald Knowing what your customers want and need and delivering it are key concepts for any business. But how do you really know what your customers want? The first person I worked for after graduating from college knew exactly what his customers wanted and needed. He had that knowledge because he once held […]