The best marketing, operations, technical and financial plans in the world are going to fail miserably if they’re released into a toxic work environment. Employee infighting, self-serving priorities and departmental turf wars act like anchors that drown even the most brilliant strategies and tactics. Conversely, a healthy culture is like fertile soil. Just like plants thrive in an environment that is rich in nutrients, businesses with healthy cultures effectively execute work that develops employees, delivers value for customers and creates financial rewards for shareholders.

Getting the culture right and putting mechanisms in place to keep it right is the best way to ensure that every subsequent step gets maximum traction. The organization will be poised for true transformation.

You will discover –

• Cultural Imperatives – Six characteristics of a healthy culture, that, if absent are almost guaranteed to tank your organizational health
• Guaranteed culture killers
• How to transform a toxic culture – the first step is probably not what you think it is
• Screening new employees for culture fit – learn how to bake culture questions into your screening and hiring process so you hire right the first time and every time
• How culture fits with mission, vision and core values – lots of consultants make you create mission statements, vision statements and a list of core values, but not many of them tell you why and explain what you’re going to do with each of them AND how they inform organizational culture

You will receive –

• A Customizable Template for the Employee Commitment – a tool that codifies the culture AND makes it easy to have a meaningful culture conversation with every employee
• How Organizational Culture Shapes Individual Employee Interactions – A PDF that explains the role of culture in screening, hiring, onboarding, managing, employee development, employee discipline and, if necessary, termination.
• How they Fit – A PDF that illustrates the relationship between Mission, Vision, Values and Culture.

The struggle for talent is real. Hiring managers kiss lots of frogs on their way to finding a well-hidden prince or princess. And when they find a stellar employee, the organization is challenged quickly to find the best way to engage them in meaningful work and give them opportunities to lead and grow.

And, maybe more importantly, those employees must work seamlessly with a new team that must quickly produce results where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Owners and managers long to be surrounded with people they trust – people whose highest professional aim is the good of the organization, people who are committed to lifelong personal and professional growth. This session provides the framework for finding and keeping those people.

You will discover –

• How to screen for company core values in the interview process
• The role of assessments in the screening process so you can build a toolbox that really works
• The importance of meaningful onboarding so new employees quickly feel a part of the team and become productive right out of the gate
• A framework for aligning the interests of the company with the interests of the employee
• Three things employees want from work – according to the social sciences
• How to create an employee development plan
• Options for value-based compensation plans

You will receive –

• Employees As … PDF – a framework that lets managers view employees through four lenses. It powers their development and deployment in the organization
• Employee Development Planner PDF in two parts – a self-directed study for the employee and an implementation plan used in one-to-one meetings between employee and supervisor
• An Onboarding Checklist – what employees need to know, experience and feel immediately following the accepted job offer – spoiler alert: it starts before the first day of on the job

There are only a handful of business activities that approach “holy grail” status and value creation is one of them. Value creation is the key driver of consumer choice and business profitability. It might seem hard to believe, but the mechanical components of value creation are the same for every organization – public sector or private sector, product or service, for-profit or not-for-profit. Since the discipline is so pervasive, it’s imperative that every business owner and manager understand it fully.

You will discover –

• The three key activities in the value creation chain and where they happen in the organization
• The role of departments and employees not directly involved in economic value creation
• The difference between economic and experiential value creation and why both are vital to the organization
• The three goals of economic value creation
• The three drivers of experiential value creation

You will receive –

• Vendor Selection/Evaluation Checklist PDF – Vendors are an important part of the value creation chain. This checklist will help evaluate them based on culture fit, quality, performance, customer service and financial stability
• Value Creation Walkthrough PDF – A list of questions, segregated by value creation activity that an owner or manager can use to systematically walk through value creation processes in the organization. Questions include people, process, vendor and tech related items.

Healthy organizations are fiscally disciplined. Sales revenue is carefully forecasted, acquired and collected. Expenses fund employee productivity, development and efficiently create the product or service for the client. Money on hand is carefully managed and deployed in appropriate investment vehicles. Debt is used judiciously.

Clearly, a one-hour workshop can’t cover everything that an organization needs to know when it comes to finances, but we’ll identify some areas that represent common struggles for businesses.

You will discover –

• The crucial money metrics for all businesses
• How fixed and variable costs impact company financial performance
• How to calculate the lifetime value of a customer and why it’s important even during initial sales activities
• What fiscally disciplined companies do differently
• Capital expenses vs operating expenses
• Budgets or no budgets
• How to push financial literacy down through the organization

You will receive –

• A “cheat sheet” explaining important financial metrics and how to calculate them
• Questions to ask your accountant. Should you keep the one you have or find a new one?
• Resources to find industry-specific money metrics

Unfortunately, in many organizations, the only metric for “winning” is the amount of money left in the bank at the end of the month. Healthy organizations have accurately identified a handful (6-12) of key performance indicators that are truly indicative of organization health. Just like body temperature, pulse rate, respiration rate and blood pressure constitute “vital signs” for health, these metrics (though different for each business) accurately measure and report performance on activities that are essential for the continued viability of the organization.

You will discover –

• How to create a Balanced Scorecard spanning financial performance, customer experience, operational effectiveness and organizational capacity.
• Not every that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted
• How to create metrics to track project progress
• How to disseminate reporting to everyone in the organization
• How to equip team members to make meaning from metrics reporting
• How to turn insights from reporting into corrective action

You will receive –

• Balanced Scorecard examples
• Project tracking examples
• Engagement tools for team members
  • Interpreting results
  • Making corrective actions

Every organization needs an operational framework – systems for tracking performance, processes for execution, meeting management methodologies, project management methodologies, regular strategic planning and a strong technology platform underlying all of it. This module provides an outline on which strong managers can build out a robust operations and implementation framework.

You will discover –

• A framework for simultaneously solving problems and developing employees
• A methodology for discovering and documenting processes
• Essentials for meeting management – before, during and after
• An implementation framework that ensures that projects are started AND finished
• The rationale for a regularly scheduled Strategic Planning exercise
• A methodology for assessing the value the deployed tech in your organization is generating

You will receive –

• A process documentation template
• A meeting management toolkit (meeting prep materials, pre-meeting email template, meeting outlines, post-meeting email template)
• Access to a video course on implementation
• A primer on strategic planning

Innovation is rarely the by-product of light bulb moments and random flashes of brilliance. Instead, it’s the ability to solve a problem in a unique way that resonates with the people who have that problem. The ability to synthesize input from existing and potential customers, input from employees, ideas from other industries, ideas from other disciplines and the value creation capabilities of the organization can yield valuable new products, services and processes. This is the skill that propels companies into sustained competitive advantage.

You will discover –

• The value of letting problem-solving employees work on things that interest them instead of only things that interest the boss
• How to listen
• The essential discipline of engaging in creative destruction
• The essential discipline of synthesis
• The value of cognitive diversity

You will receive –

• A problem-solving primer
• The creative destruction reading list (for a little inspiration)
• A PDF – Diversity – What We Got Right and What We Got Wrong and Why It Matters