Acute talent shortages are seriously impacting many businesses. Let’s address the top of the talent bucket: recruiting. It does no good to keep pouring new employees into your talent bucket if there’s a hole in the bottom through which people are leaking out. We’re talking of course about employee retention. There are five serious mistakes that I see organizations and leaders make when it comes to keeping their people. Let’s address three of the most deep-rooted and misguided beliefs we have about employee retention and discuss some strategies for keeping your best people. Friendly warning: Much of what follows goes against both the conventional wisdom and common HR practices. So buckle up. Mistake #1: Treating people the same. Let’s say there are 100 employees at a company, all at various levels in the organization. In the last six months, 14 of them have resigned for jobs elsewhere and there are

Inflation. Supply chain woes. Gasoline prices. Talent shortages. The R-word That Must Not Be Named (shhh, you’ll make it happen!). Vistage expert speaker Xavier Douwes suggests there’s a way to beat all this: “Operations is really the non-sexy secret to success in every business.” Here are some take-aways from Xavier’s Six Sigma world which can help you to get even more traction with your strategy: Define success. This is as seen in the eyes of the customer, not anyone else. It’s important to get really specific here. We might have to dig deeper with our customers, and when we do, we usually find that it’s really only one or two things that top their lists because those drive everything else. Then we have to measure that success. In my experience most companies are at the extreme ends of a KPI spectrum: some companies measure some basic things that aren’t really

In my line of work I’m honored to partner with high-caliber leaders who are trying to move the needle in one or more areas of their businesses. Sometimes the conversation turns to presence: How do you want to show up as a leader, and how does that compare with how you are showing up? We often think of “leadership presence” as what we see when a leader is larger than life: Type A, uber-extroverted, radiating charisma and confidence. Commanding everyone’s notice. Rallying and inspiring the troops. Taking the proverbial hill. This approach works in certain situations (like actual military combat, for one), yet many business leaders are often beguiled into thinking that they need more of “that” to be effective. Instead, I challenge them to step back and re-frame their assumptions. I periodically need to encourage a leader to “get out from behind the keyboard.” Many of us successfully keep

If you want to know how healthy a business really is, don’t ask to see the financials first. Ask to see the Issues List. I’ve been running EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) sessions with leadership teams for years, and I’ve learned that the Issues List tells me more about the true state of a business in five minutes than almost anything else. The number of issues on it. The types of issues on it. How long they’ve been there. Whether the team is willing to put things on it at all. It’s one of the most underappreciated diagnostic tools in the entire EOS framework — and most teams have no idea they’re sitting on a goldmine of information about themselves. What Your Issues List Is Actually Telling You Let me walk you through some of what I see, and what it typically means. Too many tactical issues? EOS hasn’t been

If you want to know how healthy a business really is, don’t ask to see the financials first. Ask to see the Issues List. I’ve been running EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) sessions with leadership teams for years, and I’ve learned that the Issues List tells me more about the true state of a business in five minutes than almost anything else. The number of issues on it. The types of issues on it. How long they’ve been there. Whether the team is willing to put things on it at all. It’s one of the most underappreciated diagnostic tools in the entire EOS framework — and most teams have no idea they’re sitting on a goldmine of information about themselves. What Your Issues List Is Actually Telling You Let me walk you through some of what I see, and what it typically means. Too many tactical issues? EOS hasn’t been

Most core values don’t work. Not because they’re bad. Because nobody remembers them. Most of the time your people don’t remember them. Sometimes you don’t remember them. And that’s because they don’t define who you are at the core and what you want from the culture of your organization. There’s nothing wrong with most core values. They’re just generic. And generic doesn’t drive culture. Core values are not marketing terms. They’re not something put on your website. They’re not for virtue signaling. They are there to drive your culture. In other words, they define what the right person looks like for your company. A person that fits with your culture. These are people you love seeing in the morning. They bring you energy. They’re part of the team. There’s no friction. It just works. That’s the real purpose of core values. So why aren’t your core values working? Because you