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Why Kickoff Training is the Key to Successful Transformation: Guest Blog by MetaExpert Gregg Young

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Patricia Linn
Transformation is change, and change is hard. People resist change. Even if today’s situation is terrible, change is still uncomfortable and scary – a case of the devil you know vs. the devil you don’t. People must become committed to the desired transformation, and this requires communication AND training. Communication lets people understand the vision, the desired outcome of the transformation. Training gives them the skills they will need in order to successfully contribute and therefore become committed. This kickoff training gives people the skills they need to become effective problem solvers, tools based on the “observation, then deduction” method of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes would look for clues at a crime scene, things that were out of place or different. Workers are trained to observe their own operations, to look at conditions when it performs brilliantly and when it performs terribly. They learn tools that search for the Consistent Differences…
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Training That Creates Mutual Accountability: Guest Blog by MetaExpert Andy Goldstrom

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Patricia Linn
Andy Goldstrom
When I was 30, I was extended an offer to serve as an Account Director at a small, start-up company.  The CEO and Founder created a unique and accountable culture from the day he opened for business.  The offer contained all the requisite language about the responsibilities and rewards, but what was most impactful was the last paragraph before the signature block, which said: “This employment offer is based on Andy’s commitment to USI’s standard Business Practices and Operating Philosophy, including: Making commitments and keeping them Providing total quality in everything you do Being a team player Holding yourself accountable to the USI team and Holding the USI team accountable to you” The company had a strong value proposition, but what was just as important was the culture.  Healthy and competitive peer pressure emanated throughout the organization.  When one person succeeded, the entire team succeeded.  When one person failed, the…
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Why Interim Executives Are the Private Equity Industry’s Best Solution to Being Under-Resourced — Guest Blog by MetaExpert Bob Flynn

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Patricia Linn
Bob Flynn
Private equity portfolio companies face aggressive goals when they try to expand their business in short-time frames. With acquisitions thrown into the mix, there is added complexity and risk. The projects to accomplish these growth and integration initiatives require dedicated resources and your best resources who are already spread too thin end up being over-utilized. The best strategy is to find experienced, specialized, interim resources that you can rely on, and have them available on demand. A key area of focus is to have a strong Project Management Office with enough project management talent and project management professionals, and a great process to drive your strategic initiatives. Plan ahead, form these relationships now with strategic staffing and talent companies. Make sure these companies and their team can deliver the breadth and depth of talent required, especially in terms of industry expertise and functional knowledge. Oftentimes, it takes weeks to find…
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Lean Leader’s Checklist: How to Set Lean Leadership and Management Expectations–Guest Blog by MetaExpert Chuck Intrieri

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Patricia Linn
Chuck Intrieri
Set high-performance expectation goals & pace of daily support of the new manner of work Engage & empower your people to solve problems Create an organizational structure with readily identified team leaders to allow continuous change to happen Form core teams with strong leader and team members along the path of workflow Breakdown barriers between artificial silos of control so improvements can occur horizontally Foster regular communication within and between workstations within your control as well as outside your department (customer-supplier relationships) Drive reduction in variability by standardizing the work activities, connections, and pathways Implement visual management, with posted daily metrics of value for each work unit reflecting opportunities for change or stability of process Stabilize processes through a continuous focus on waste reduction Move to continuous flow, innovate triggers to ‘pull’ work Identify opportunities for front loading and work simplification Continually push to reduce time waste daily Increase Throughput…
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Executives, Here Are the Only 6 Things You Need to Know About Disruption to Be a Disruptor

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Patricia Linn
7 Stages of Becoming a Disruptor
The word disruption is so overused in business it threatens to become jargon which is never a positive fate for a term as important as this one. The people overusing the word and jargonizing it are usually using it wrong. If you understand what it means precisely, takes the following six points seriously to heart and do what you do best — much more aggressively — you can transform your organization into a disruptor. The Actual Definition of Disruption Disruption: something that changes the game entirely. In business, it’s a product or service that has a staggering effect on events, activities, processes, and people in a marketplace. It’s what happened to the world when regular people could buy cars, radios, televisions, VHS players, cell phones — commodities that changed the way we live our lives, and that we had never had before. It’s what happened when we could go online…
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Guest Blog by MetaExpert Giusseppe Lovecchio: Achieving Supply Chain Operational Excellence by Unlocking the Great Potential In Every Organization

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Patricia Linn
Supply chain workers
Achieving supply chain operational excellence is not an easy target, you need to combine a variety of different factors together; attitudes and competencies, robust processes, and the right technology are just the minimum requirements. The most difficult obstacles I come across are related to the partial achievement of these three aspects, the most common relating to people, their attitudes, and competencies. How to improve the competency of your staff? Measure their progress and motivate their behavior toward excellent performance. Many programs and tools exist: skill matrix, gap analysis, focused training programs for competence upgrade, and so on. The measurement of a higher set of competencies must then be correlated to the superior process performance in terms of output and throughput. A systemic approach helps to reach excellence, a set of proven tools and methods – with the right commitment of top management and superior consultancy performance – are the key…
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Executive Excellence Series (6 of 50): Holding Meetings for the Sake of Holding Meetings

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Patricia Linn
Bored and tired businesspeople
The Wharton School maintains there are three reasons to hold a meeting. Period. To: “Create a forum—an opportunity for individuals with different values, ideas, and experiences to share their perspectives.” Make decisions and set “direction for the organization or unit.” Build and/or make a team stronger through “developing collective capabilities.” Period. They further maintain (as do we), that meetings should never be held: For information exchange, or Soapboxing (telling rather than exchanging). Period. If you are holding meetings for the two purposes directly above. Stop it immediately. If you are holding meetings for any reasons other than the top three listed, you are: Wasting precious productive time, Wasting precious financial resources (check out this meeting cost calculator), Encouraging unproductive behavior, Forcing everyone to multitask (especially during the meetings), and Diminishing employee respect and loyalty. Inc.com published these alarming (U.S. only) statistics: There are 25 million meetings held each day, That’s…
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Executive Excellence Series (5 of 50): Assuming that Communication Can be Controlled

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Patricia Linn
Young woman gossiping to her male colleague at the
The bad news is you can’t control all the communication that takes place in your organization. But, you have to try. In the article, Executives: Get Top Performance from Your Contractors and Remote Teams by Communicating Culture, I wrote about how important it is that your workers at home, in other countries, and even in other states are made a part of your company’s culture through communication. Conversely, if that communication doesn’t have ground rules and adherence to them, misrepresented or misinterpreted voice and digital communication can cause catastrophic breakdowns in relationships and processes. This is what you need to do — (and DMAIC the system regularly: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control, or you won’t keep control): All the news that is important to share with your peers and employees (both good and bad, internal and external) should be shared by you, not anyone else. Kick the email habit…
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Executive Excellence Series (4 of 50): Failing to Offer Constructive Input During Employee Evaluations

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Patricia Linn
Stressed businesswoman
For most executives, performing employee evaluations is a necessary evil — highly important but low on personal priority list. For employees they are usually stressful, filled with mixed messages (a bit of praise, a bit of criticism — neither of which are constructive input), and ultimately uninspiring, if not downright deflating. The most valuable use of an employee review is what’s typically missing: constructive input. What you want your employees to take away from every review is: performance improvement, job satisfaction, employee retention and refreshed motivation. Those characteristics are not born of the praise/criticize cycle, but of collaborative goal setting, problem-solving, and encouragement for innovation. Here’s how to break out of the “pointless review” cycle and into the “let’s work even better” cycle. A few weeks before the performance review, ask the employee to write down: The top three achievements he made that year that he found fulfilling and the…
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Guest Blog by MetaExpert Giuseppe Lovecchio: Key Elements of Communication for Achieving Operational Excellence

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Patricia Linn
Giuseppe Lovecchio
Business communications problems are at the heart of Operational Excellence performance. Statistics say that about 90% of time spent by managers is devoted to communication, so it is paramount to be prepared on this topic. Of this communication, we know that about 70% is non-verbal, in terms of motion, posture, eye contact, and so on. Emotional intelligence can help to overcome the types of non-performing attitude that can result from bad communication. Additionally, in a multicultural environment, it is key to understand cultural barriers and how to overcome them through robust communication approaches. Another key point in business communication is the use of “verbal” or “text” communication. Especially in a supplier/customer relationship, it is important to understand what communication channel the supplier or the customer prefers. In this way, the communication is facilitated because there is a capacity for adaptation. Communication is not an easy task, especially in this interconnected…
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