“Our company is in growth mode, and we are feeling ‘pains’ due to how we have handled growth to date. We are trying to prevent the growing pains from getting worse but are having limited success.” Does this sound familiar? The amount of growing pains experienced by a company can be impacted by a variety [...]

  "Let's continue this discussion at next week's meeting, because we need to take another look at these issues to get everyone's commitment." As soon as Bill heard the vice president make this statement, his blood pressure shot up 20 points, because this would be the third time that a decision has been kicked down [...]

How can we help make employee engagement a natural part of our organization? If your company has recently completed an engagement survey, this is likely to be a question you hear more than once. There are a number of ways that organizations can help make this happen. The ones that I encounter most often are [...]

If you are an executive moving into a new role or implementing a change in your organization (e.g., a company, a division, etc.), you may be thinking about designing or redesigning your organization. Although it is natural to want to modify your organization in such a way, this should be done with some clarity and [...]

Have we clearly identified our organization’s competitive advantage? Are we creating a blue ocean as the strategic market space for our company? How does this relate to our human capital? How helpful is a balanced scorecard? Some colleagues may ask these types of questions as you do strategic planning at your organization (especially if these [...]

Who should be on the executive team, and how can we help ensure that the team operates in an effective manner? These are frequent questions that I encounter when working with organizations, and they are important questions given that teams fail about 60% of the time according to the research of Eunice Parisi-Carew. Many organizations [...]

Do you have the right people and necessary competencies to achieve your strategic objectives for this year as well as the next several years? Although this seems like an intuitive business question, many executives are slow to ask it (if they ask it at all). Historically, companies do not give enough consideration to strategic workforce [...]

Are the “what” and the “how” really that important to organizations? The “what” and the “how” are abbreviated descriptions for two critical elements organizations (and the leaders and employees who drive them) need to function. The “what” represents results that come from the performance of work done at the individual, team or organizational level. Examples [...]

As the economy continues to improve, companies are likely to be thinking about the challenges they face in operating their businesses and crafting the solutions to address them. For those organizations that may have already taken these steps, this may be the time when executives at these companies put those solutions in place. Unfortunately, a [...]