Effective Managers Spend Little Time in the Weeds.

Effective managers know one thing, spending time in the weeds (aka – being too “hands-on”) is counter-productive and can sabotage their ability to lead and provide direction. A manager who spends too much time in the weeds by deciding to do tasks normally reserved for direct reports or other resources essentially abandons their core responsibility...

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Great Leaders are Successful Failures

It isn’t a secret; the world we live in today is the result of some of the greatest failures humanity has seen. However, it isn’t the actual failures that resulted in many of the objects, events, and governments that currently make up the world, but rather the attitude of the individuals who learned from the failures. (The apparent oxymoron – “Successful...

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The importance of a 15-minute daily huddle with your team.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen in business is managers not establishing a routine daily team meeting. The benefits are basic but the risks of not holding routine meetings can be catastrophic.  The daily team meeting has one major purpose; to align the team. Many things can happen during the daily course of business and keeping teams...

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Drop the F-Bomb occasionally to keep your team on task.

More often than not managers are not (or dare I say never) at the helm of a self-directing dream team. That is, a team of overachievers that always remains on task, can change priorities to match the organization’s needs, and never makes mistakes. In reality a manager will not have a self-directing dream team (why would you need a manager then?),...

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If you set everything on fire, you won’t have enough firefighters.

Firefighters will very seldom have enough people and water to put out a fire immediately. They have to choose (prioritize) where they can effectively douse the flames to first contain the fire - essentially ignoring the rest of the fire - and then work it down until it’s extinguished In crisis situations everything becomes a fire, or so it...

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Say what you do and do what you say!

The statement is very simplistic, but if organizations would simplify their quality systems to just that one rule they’d be surprised how easy managing the system would become. Whether you are following ISO 9001, ISO/TS 16949, VDA 6.3 or any other system, there are tremendous amounts of details and other rules that need to be followed. Most organizations...

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Stop the insanity and lead your team to embrace change.

One of the phrases I get drawn to every time I struggle with accomplishing something is one coined by Albert Einstein: Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It is a rather funny, but true way to quickly shed light on an incorrect method or process being the culprit of a problem.  There is one...

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How many managers does it take to change a light bulb?

Possible Answers: 1)    "I want a detailed memo about this issue till tomorrow's morning." 2)     "You were supposed to have changed that light bulb last week!" 3)    "We haven't got a policy on that". 4)    "I am on my way to a very important meeting, so we'll discuss...

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Crises and Communication - the important art of listening to your team's cries for help.

I speak from experience here, in fact we all do… when we were young – before we uttered our first words – we cried to get attention. We wanted our parents to listen to help solve a problem. We were cold, we were hungry, or our tummy’s hurt. In fact, reading medical journals, we never cried for the sake of crying. There was usually something we could...

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8D Process : Define the problem accurately and you'll find an effective solution

In my 20+ years of manufacturing I have read and/or worked on hundreds of 8Ds. I would venture to say that less than 10% of those led to effective solutions. The biggest problem in those ineffective 8Ds was the problem definition.  If the problem is not properly defined based on facts and data you may be leading your team down a path that will...

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