Maximizing Performance Through People
Defining the Win
How do you define the word “Winning”? More importantly, how do you define it when it comes to your business or organization? Winning is a matter of outperforming your competition, accomplishing your core objectives and remaining true to your core values. It’s about performing at a level where you are actively driven, highly focused and fully committed to reaching your goals.
As a business leader, you’ve set your focus and, on a daily basis, you defy the status quo in order to move that business forward. You’ve chosen this path fully knowing it’s a challenge, because you believe in an extraordinary future. Your belief in what could be propels you far past what is. There is no exact template for you to follow. You create it. You drive it. You stand up, move forward and do the work necessary to achieve the results you’re after.
You realize that when it comes to winning, there is nothing more powerful than a highly talented team, aligned, engaged and committed to exceeding their objectives, especially when it performs under effective leadership. The business plan is created. Now it comes down to putting the plans in motion…hiring, training, engaging and retaining a diverse group of individual performers and focusing their collective efforts to achieve the vision that you have created.
You lead, understanding the weight of your decisions and the challenges of that role. You focus your efforts on ensuring that you position others for success because, when your team is successful, you are successful. You work tirelessly to overcome the obstacles that stand in their way. You’ve lost more sleep than you care to admit and spend every waking hour looking for solutions, because that’s what it takes to win.
Winning in business takes more than a financial strategy, a slick marketing process or even a great product or service. Winning requires you and your team to be operating at the highest level. The keys to reaching that level include:
- Clearly defining and communicating your vision for how business is to be conducted
- Planning your HR needs in advance and creating a strategy that will guide your decisions
- Creating the core administrative structure that provides direction, amplifies team capabilities and minimizes risk
- Hiring, training and motivating talented individuals with the capability to reach far past basic expectations
- Cultivating a culture that drives performance, engagement, trust and collaboration
- Managing employee performance in a manner that helps you identify who to maintain, develop or safely exit
That's where HR Strategies Now comes in - moving your business forward through solid Human Resources consulting services that cover the full HR life cycle.
Choosing to Help You Win
Recently I realized that I had a choice to make. I could either continue pouring all of my effort into managing Human Resources practices for established businesses or actively partner with small to mid-sized organizations and help them create their HR practices, often from the ground-up. I chose the latter because I believe this is the best opportunity to make a solid impact on the lives of others.
My focus is on the tactical rather than big theory that often comes from major consulting firms. With over 25 years of HR experience including 17 years in a management capacity, I have actively driven strong Human Resources practices and witnessed their impact on business performance. Business growth, positive financials, operational success and world class customer experience - they are outcomes created by organizations who focus heavily on hiring, aligning, developing, managing, motivating, engaging and retaining high quality talent.
I’m passionate about creating environments where organizations and their employees can thrive long term. When I take on a new client, I make every effort to clearly understand the business operating model, mission, vision and core values. I explore the leadership imperatives and the challenges at hand and then create plans to methodically solve problems and improve performance across the HR spectrum.
Often, this requires a fresh start with a clear analysis of the current state, the development of the HR strategy and then the installation of initiatives to drive better results in workforce planning, compensation and benefits, talent acquisition, on-boarding, training and development, performance management, employee relations, talent management and off-boarding.
I’ve had the great fortune of working with teams ranging from 8 employees to over 18,000. I’ve carried full responsibility for HR operations within the United States and have partnered with international teams in Canada, Brazil, Australia, Norway and Turkey. My functional experience includes work in the finance, manufacturing, oil and gas, technology and medical industries.
I look forward to working with you toward improving the performance of your business. If you believe your team has greater performance potential than what you’re seeing, let’s talk. Call HR Strategies Now.
July 9, 2021
From Theory to Execution - Building a Culture That Demands Leadership If leadership excellence isn’t about knowledge, then what is it about? It’s about building an environment where leadership is required, visible, and unavoidable. Most organizations never get there. Here’s how the ones that do think differently. Step 1: Define Leadership in Behavioral Terms “Be a better leader” is meaningless. Instead, define leadership like this: “Addresses performance issues within 48 hours” “Delegates decisions with clear ownership and authority” “Drives clarity by aligning team priorities weekly” If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it. Step 2: Make Leadership Measurable What gets measured gets managed. Ask: Are decisions being pushed down or pulled up? Are leaders developing successors or creating dependency? Is accountability consistent across teams? Are new ideas being generated? If leadership isn’t measured, it becomes subjective - and subjective standards don’t scale. Step 3: Align Consequences with Expectations This is where most organizations fail. They say leadership matters, but they tolerate: avoidance of difficult conversations inconsistent accountability leaders who produce results but damage culture siloed and self-optimizing behavior You can’t have leadership excellence without consequences for non-leadership behavior . Step 4: Build Leadership into the Operating System Leadership isn’t a program. It’s how the business runs. It shows up in: how meetings are conducted how decisions are made how performance is reviewed how feedback is delivered If leadership only shows up in training sessions, it won’t stick. Step 5: Create Cultural Pressure for Leadership The strongest cultures don’t rely on top-down enforcement. They create peer-level expectations. Leaders hold each other accountable, teams expect clarity and ownership, and underperformance is addressed quickly and directly Leadership becomes the norm, rather than the exception. The Payoff When leadership becomes part of the system, execution speeds up, decision-making improves, teams take ownership, and senior leaders get out of the weeds. And the organization finally operates at the level its strategy demands. Final Thought Most companies are trying to teach leadership. The best companies build environments where leadership is the only way to succeed . That’s the shift. And once it happens, everything else gets easier.
Let’s address the uncomfortable truth: Most leaders already know what they should be doing. They just don’t do it consistently. Not because they’re incapable - but because something is working against them. What’s Really Holding Leaders Back? It’s not a lack of awareness. It’s a combination of three forces that quietly shape behavior: 1. Success Has Trained Them to Stay the Same Leaders are promoted because they deliver results. So they double down on what got them there: solving problems themselves moving quickly by making decisions solo stepping in when things go sideways The problem? Those behaviors don’t scale. But letting go of them feels risky. So they don’t. 2. Short-Term Pressure Overrides Long-Term Discipline In theory, leaders know they should: coach instead of direct develop instead of fix empower instead of control But in reality? Deadlines hit. Clients escalate. Revenue matters. So they revert to speed and control because it’s faster right now. And just like that, long-term leadership development loses to short-term execution pressure. 3. The Organization Quietly Rewards the Wrong Behavior Watch closely and you’ll see it - the leader who “jumps in and saves the day” gets praised. Or the leader who builds a self-sufficient team gets overlooked. Or perhaps the leader who avoids conflict keeps the peace and avoids backlash. Organizations say they want leadership excellence. But their reward systems often reinforce the opposite. Why This Matters More Than You Think When leaders don’t change: their teams don’t grow decision-making stays centralized innovation slows burnout increases at the top And eventually, the business hits a ceiling that no strategy can fix. The Real Work of Leadership Development If you want leaders to change, you have to change the environment around them. That means: redefining what “good leadership” looks like aligning incentives with the behaviors you want creating consequences for avoiding leadership responsibilities Because people don’t rise to expectations. They rise to what the system reinforces .
Most companies don’t lack leadership knowledge—they lack execution. Discover why leadership fails and what it takes to turn insight into results.
