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February 2010 Newsletter
The Best Places to Work Roadmap Part 4 of 5: DELI - Everyone Likes Gourmet
Individual Opportunity Creation
What is opportunity creation? As you look at the "Best Places" questions you start to see that individual opportunity creation includes chances to be promoted, acceptance of an individual's ideas, and enabling people to serve their organization completely. This can be through cross training or simply the knowledge to know more about the enterprise.
This new energy regarding opportunity creation is happening for a couple of reasons.
- First - Business needs it! It is a way to get the creative juices of people to work for the organization. It is no secret that people give their bosses/organizations what they ask for. For whatever reason, we are not asking for enough. This recession graphically illustrates to everyone that an antidote for a business to survive is innovation. Creativity and the involvement of people as close to the customer as possible becomes critical and not optional. These people serve directly and they have known for quite some time what the customer wants. We started asking, no, we started insisting that people give more than just their "back" to their work. Businesses need their minds, hearts, ideas, solutions, appreciation and belief. The arguments for not asking people to opportunity create has been around for a long time:
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Tips to Motivate and Engage your Employee Base
 Since Craig is on vacation this week, we thought it would be a good idea to highlight one of his older articles just in case you missed it the first time.
As the economic climate continues to persist it has been a challenge for all leaders to maintain morale and continuously improve customer service standards. In all work environments leaders have been asked to do more with fewer supplies, people, and finances. Although this challenge has been around longer than the latest economic down turn, it has been heightened by it. Very often our conversations with leaders and managers turn to motivation and asking more from people within their organization. With businesses making tough decisions, the customers, internal and external, continue to demand the best possible service.
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Updated Needs Analysis Process
 For those of you who are not familiar, our Needs Analysis is a free diagnostic we offer on our website that can help you to assess your need for training and development. For this analysis we have developed 16 categories based on some of the most common organizational needs. Once you have completed the diagnostic, your results are instantly accessible. The Needs Analysis is a great place to start if you feel like you could benefit from development of some kind but are unsure where to begin.
Recently the Needs Analysis has been updated! Now instead of taking all 16 categories you can choose to take the analysis on only the categories that interest you. You also have the ability to take the Needs Analysis as many times as desired.
For those of you who have already completed a Needs Analysis, don't worry. You can access your results the same way you always have. Now you simply have the option to take it again if you wish to expand your leadership training or your organizational needs have changed.
Click here to take a Needs Analysis or for more information.
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Speed and Volume Don't Generally Mean Quality
 In my early 20s I often received positive feedback, such as, "You are doing the work of two people!" and "You are really good at multi tasking!" I prided myself in the fact that I could do more than one task or quickly and efficiently do things at the speed of light. This speed lasted a couple of decades and I realized that there are choices I could make that would allow me to slow down a bit and really pay attention to what I loved most about being in the professional working world. It turns out, that it's not about doing so many things in so little time and it's not all about how much money I can make if people see me as a hard-working employee. Although back in the day I was good at doing multiple things at once, I realized that burn-out was right around the corner.
Here it is 35 plus years later and I find myself constantly trying to focus on only one thing at a time. Why? So I can fully appreciate the scope and breadth of the project or goal or the conversation that needs my full attention. I've literally gone from the constant moving of accomplishments and career growth to slowing down and focusing on one thing at a time. Another reason why is because I found myself distracted during a phone conversation one afternoon and I got caught not knowing where the conversation was at. Luckily it was a friend of mine who brought it to my attention. I was really embarrassed and decided then and there that I would walk away from the work and concentrate on the conversation and it has helped me be a better communicator as well as do the good job that needs to be done.
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Book Of The Month: I Quit and I Forgot To Tell You
This book as it says on the cover in the white circle is about "Attacking the Spreading Virus of Disengagement". This book has under a hundred pages and, if you want to get to the root causes of disengagement in your organization, this is the book to read. Terri Kabachnick gets right to the point and has realistic ways to combat this very costly-to-the-bottom-line business challenge.
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