Take Time to Assess the Quality of Your Business Meetings
  Meetings can be a powerful tool for your business. If poorly run however, they can be a tremendous waste of time and energy and actually cause more harm than good. There are a few key elements that every meeting should contain to make them worthwhile. As a leader, one of your biggest jobs is to ensure information exchange. Meetings are a huge part of that task. We encourage you to take a closer look at the quality of your […]
Deftly Dealing with Criticism and Activism Toward Your Company in a New Community
I used to live in a small town with a fairly depressed economy. Over the previous two decades, they’d lost the farm machinery plant, the appliance plant, and the industrial restaurant equipment plant. Good jobs were hard to come by, people were hurting, and most young people left town as soon as they turned eighteen.   When a new plant announced it was moving to town, you might have expected the local community to be overjoyed. After all, it was […]
Create and Cultivate Great Culture to Secure High Performance
Company culture seems to be a widely circulated term, but one that few people clearly understand. Culture is the ‘good stuff” in an organization that makes individuals work harder, more enthusiastically, with honest direct communication, which translates into peak performance. It may be defined as: a company’s values, practices, beliefs, language or simply the way of thinking that exists in an organization.   If you want to be a truly successful and innovative company, culture must be a daily focus in […]
Cognitive Flexibility in Leadership Can Make Any NC Business As Nimble As a Small Business
It was 4th down on the two-yard line, early in the first quarter of a September 2013 game between the struggling Carolina Panthers and the go-nowhere Giants. The choice to go for it or not was a seemingly obvious decision. Of course, you kick the field goal. You “have to take the points here,” as announcers are fond of saying. Panther’s head coach Ron Rivera was perhaps the perfect example of a by-the-book coach. Generations of coaches had kicked the […]
Continually Improve Your Leadership Capabilities
  As a leader you must continually build your techniques, capabilities and habits. You need to be able to evaluate honestly where you are, what strengths you have and what you need to work on. Some of the improvements can be external, some internal and at times it is simply awareness of your weaknesses. “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of […]
Empowering Employees to Speak Up: Why Raleigh’s Red Hat Meritocracy Is Effective
It should have been an easy meeting. Management at all levels agreed on the path for the new initiative. It wasn’t really a time for discussion; it was a time to explain plans and to set goals. And then, a lowly associate asked to speak. Point by point, goal by goal, the associate tore into the agreed-upon solutions. Management was taking the wrong direction. The new program would fail without key changes. He could see the flaws in their plan, […]
How to Make Your Company More Innovative: What Proctor & Gamble Teaches Us About Company Culture
Your company has a problem. You used to be small and innovative, but lately you’ve gotten too big. It used to be easy to implement big and exciting new changes to products and processes, but now it seems difficult. Projects balloon out of control, and seem to serve the company rather than the customers. How can you keep growing, but recapture the spirit of innovation that you’ve lost? Is it possible to innovate at all levels? It’s easy to despair […]
Choosing Project Team Members: The Five Employees You Need on Every Team
Kaitlyn’s company had a big contract coming up and she wanted to put the perfect team together to finish the job. As a very involved CEO, her first step seemed obvious. She went straight to the resumes. She knew she needed a coder, a designer, a technical writer, a customer support person, and a manager. She’d just choose the best person for each job, and then she’d have her dream team, right? Wrong. As she compiled her list, Robert, her […]
How to Increase Employee Engagement in the Workplace
We recently encountered a client with a problem. They wanted to build their business with an engaged, cooperative workforce—a common goal of so many of our clients. However, their company was extremely compartmentalized, so employees from different divisions hardly ever spoke to each other. This led to a great deal of disconnect between various departments. For instance, the sales team and the warehouse team viewed each other as adversaries, rather than as allies. Obviously, this was a roadblock on the […]