One of the most underappreciated skills we work on with accountable leaders who direct growth in big firms is the ability to have productive conflict. By productive conflict, we mean conflict that leads to clarity, alignment and resources being applied to the right problem. We’ve spoken before about how real growth pivots around three elements: […]
“I never saw that coming. We are now able to provide prototypes in the time it used to take us to get an approved order in the system…” (manufacturing client) Have you been on or led that team? The one that worked – that not just “met,” but collaborated and built something that none of […]
You are a lean machine. You take frequent Gemba walks, and you’ve read all Taiichi Ohno’s original texts. There is no waste in your system – both on the creative work you do and the implementation work that follows. Does this sound like your firm? If so, then your firm has some very powerful attributes – […]
They had seemingly done it all correctly: held the offsite, chartered a leader and provided the resources asked for by the team. The person leading the team was one of their best – a leader with a talent for influence and results. Why then, was this work stream falling short of implementation and financial contribution? […]
“Yes, there was that moment, and I was really unsure of which side was up. You helped us trust the framework and it pulled us through …” The above comment was made recently by a client during an after project review. We had just completed a project that included some significant challenges both with external […]
I found myself (in a former role) being one of the leaders in a business unit, that while strategically very important, was hemorrhaging cash. As the person responsible for product and operations, I immediately set to work getting a plan in place that would “turn things around.” We did all the right things to get […]
It happens to every group of people working to achieve a common goal: there are periods of great progress and alignment and cycles where things are just not working. Making a move when things are not working seems straightforward. But as we’ll discover below, it’s harder than it appears to fix the deeper issue that […]
It’s a turning point in our Complete Growth Leader “Jumpstart” workshops that usually happens after the group has been briefed on the four key styles of the Complete Growth Leader model, as well as the five stages of STRIDE that every growth project follows. The goal of the workshop is this: to take a […]
I have been doing some coaching work with cross-functional teams in mature organizations and one topic that comes up over and over again is this: when a team finds some process or data that indicates something is clearly not delivering the desired outcome, how do they speak the truth to Senior Leadership? Many of you […]
It’s one of the most exhilarating and rewarding things we do in pilot recurrency training. The instructor puts the plane into an “unusual attitude” while you are looking at the floor to induce a bit of mild vertigo. The instructor then takes the controls and purposely flies a disorienting maneuver and says, “Ok, you’ve got […]
