Building Operational Excellence
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Stop Wasting Time on Underperformers and Start Growing Your Team’s Potential
One of the most painful lessons I’ve seen managers learn—often the hard way—is this: trying to raise the performance of the bottom 25% of your team is, more often than not, a huge waste of time and energy. How do you even know if someone’s an underperformer? It’s not always obvious. Sometimes, their incompetency has…
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The Rise of Opinion Management and The Lost Art of Discipline in the Workplace
The emergence of “enshittification” highlights a decline in customer experience as companies prioritize profit over functionality. A lack of discipline in decision-making and reliance on opinion management is prevalent. To improve outcomes, organizations must prioritize data-driven insights, accountability, and cultivate a culture encouraging critical thinking and clarity in operations.
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Could Your Efforts to Build a “Friendly” Work Culture Doing Your Company More Harm than Good?
One of the most interesting workplace trends I’ve noticed lately is the obsession with making sure people get along. There’s a constant push to “make friends at work,” as if camaraderie is the secret ingredient to performance. And while I’m a firm believer in fostering respectful, positive, and collaborative work environments, let’s be clear: genuine…
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Beyond the Buzzwords: Why Business Books Can’t Replace Real World Experience
The text emphasizes the value of surrounding oneself with smarter individuals to foster growth, challenging the discomfort of not knowing. It critiques superficial management approaches and highlights the importance of learning from experienced practitioners. True expertise involves continuous learning and engagement, while teaching should also involve seeking knowledge from others.
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Declutter to Deliver: How Cutting the Digital Clutter Can Supercharge Team Performance
One of the very first steps in implementing Lean is 5S — a structured approach to creating and maintaining an organized, efficient workspace. In manufacturing, this means tools and equipment are in working order, placed where they belong, and ready for use. The goal? Eliminate wasted time looking for things, and start your day focused…
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“What Did We Learn?” The Key to Cultural Transformation
I’m often asked how a continuous improvement culture is created. The common mistake is to think that engaging in endless one-off improvements will somehow start a flywheel effect of getting staff engaged in a problem solving mindset. Why doesn’t it work? We often forget to review the language we automatically use around the office as part of…
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Problem-Solving Techniques A Team Should Master
One of the difficulties in teaching problem solving techniques is the tendency to want to teach associates the latest business trend and expect them to execute it well. The reality is problem solving methods are messy, unique to the individual, and epiphanies happen at random times with random triggers. By exposing people to different perspectives…
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Constantly Blindsided? It’s Likely Your Fault
How often are you surprised by situations that appear to escalate quickly with little warning? It’s a sign of today’s modern times how technology and a culture of careful conversations has led to an epidemic of dysfunctional communication. In a world of texting, chat and remote work our communication has become so efficient, it’s ineffective.…
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Pet Peeves in the Workplace: Rewarding the Arsonists
I get it, stability can be boring. In the absence of “excitement,” boredom sets in, perhaps leading to demotivation. Challenges are a universal source of engagement, and this is a prevalent issue in many companies. Often, when everything seems to be running smoothly, the next significant challenge is not presented in a timely manner. Typical…
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Navigating Workplace Distractions
The idea that employees are hired to work may seem straightforward, yet it’s surprising how many distractions we inadvertently introduce that hinder task completion. Emails and meetings that lack focus on producing solutions only serve to frustrate and disengage employees. One of the most significant challenges today is affording our employees the necessary time to…
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Embracing Inefficiency in a World of Operational Excellence — Lessons From Ancestral Mezcal Production
How does maintaining old, manual, and inefficient methods fit into a world striving for operational excellence? It’s about the people, the values, and the profound meaning these methods bring to their work and lives. When founders, CEOs, and employees genuinely believe in the value provided by their process — not just the product — customers…
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Employee Pet Peeves: Managers Who Self Brand
I find it amusing when managers articulate their leadership styles, akin to those without wealth attempting to flaunt affluence. True prosperity doesn’t demand a grand display. Your management style becomes apparent through the reactions of your team; there’s no need to explicitly declare it. A common manifestation of this is seen when someone reads a…
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Lean in the Office: Exposing Invisible Processes to Unleash Productivity
Invisible processes represent the unseen and often disorganized approaches to task completion, making it challenging to monitor progress. Despite the completion of work, the specific methods used remain unclear due to the informal, inconsistent, and error-prone nature of these processes, even when carried out by the same individual. Understanding how information is shared is pivotal…
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The Role of Leadership in Operational Excellence
— an excerpt from my book Process Alchemy: Using Employee-Driven Solutions to Achieve Operational Excellence Since the beginning, I have struggled with what leadership’s role is in operational excellence. A function of the management team should be to inspire employees to think beyond boundaries. What is considered impossible that, if achieved, could revolutionize your approach?…
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Beyond FireFighting: Learning from Repeated Mistakes in Management
Having worked with management teams for nearly three decades, you start to see the same patterns repeated constantly. The same mistakes recur, even by the same team, years apart. Lessons are learned quickly at the time, and then swiftly forgotten. Let’s explore some factors that perpetuate these failures: The Focus on Being Positive This one…
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The Risk of Silence: Helping Others Speak up
Ask yourself: how often are you blindsided by situations, and how easy is it for others to approach you with difficult information? One of the quickest ways to reduce risk is to be aware that a situation might be developing. More importantly, great communication increases the speed of problem-solving and execution. As a Continuous Improvement…