Have you ever hired someone you ended up wishing you had never met? Want to consistently get top performers instead?

We have researched and created a predictable 3-step system to attract, develop, and retain top performers. If you want more of the good ones and fewer of the bad ones, we can help.

How people supervise, manage, and lead often creates a bad culture that frustrates the employees, the leaders, and ultimately the customers/clients. This costs your organization employee engagement, retention, and profits. Regardless of which level of leadership is creating the frustration, we simplify the process of developing skills that increase engagement, retention, and profits. 

We help you fix your people challenges.

What if there were frameworks that consistently brought empathy, emotional intelligence, and leadership to life?

By delivering a "Done-With-You" leadership development model, we bring expertise in-house for our clients and equip their people as knowledge leaders with their teams. For more than a quarter century, our research-based leadership development has trained up supervisors, managers, and leaders in the practical skills required for each level. 

We have worked with all industries, excelling the greatest in healthcare, manufacturing, and finance. Our focus is on equipping leaders to engage their people so that turnover goes down, engagement goes up, and profits soar. We believe strongly that there should be a measurable ROI for any professional services a company employs. By measuring the net profit increase of a company based primarily on turnover reduction and employee engagement that leads to higher performance, we have consistently provided a 10X or greater ROI for our clients on their training investments.

​We aim to solve one of the greatest challenges a business can face... people! By turning your people from challenges to assets, we propel your business toward its vision and mission and free up the time for leaders to actually lead instead of playing people problem defense!

Why Employees Leave

Perhaps one of the most frustrating things we deal with as business leaders is turnover. When we have an amazing product or service and simply want to bring it to market, we quickly realize that it isn't just about the "better mousetrap." In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that 81% of why an employee begins looking for another opportunity is because of the supervisors and leaders in the organization. This means 81 out of 100 employees seek other employment because of the way they are being mismanaged. 

The part of running a business most people don't think about is the people part. We think about strategy, marketing, sales, profitability, and a whole lot more, but often forget the linchpin in the plan. If we can supervise, manage, and lead with the right skills, we can engage our teams to give their very best and live into the purpose we are seeking as a business. 

People work for people, not for companies. When we embrace this, we realize it is the human skills that drive performance more than the technical skills. While the technical side is still important, it is the human relationship piece of leadership that makes the greatest impact. What are the behavioral interactions that would drive you to leave an organization? What would prompt you to seek other opportunities? When you sit with those questions and are truly honest, you will likely know what would drive others to leave your company. Being deliberate about building potential through strategic skills development is what will reduce turnover and increase employee engagement. In the end, we either invest in the leadership of our teams... or we pay for it.

The Four Roles of a Leader

There are four primary roles a leader plays in the workplace. Each of these roles has a profound impact on the desire of employees to follow, engage, and give their discretionary effort. Price's Law states that the square root of the total number of employees in your organization will produce 51% of the work output. This is before an intentional development program and before the deliberate replication of our top performers. This means that in a 10-employee company, 32% of your people are top performers, but in a 100-employee company, only 10% are top performers. The larger the organization, the bigger the gap becomes between the number of top performers and the rest of the employees. This brings us to developing the key skills within the four roles of a leader and how we create significantly more top performers.

Role #1 is The Connector. In order to create solid connections within the workplace, we must master three skills as a leader. Without a solid reason to connect, employees will simply go their own way and will lack both direction and inspiration. Skill 1 is Values-Based Diversity. This involves understanding why people are who they are and how they labeled their experiences in life to become this version of themselves. Skill 2 is Motivation. This requires the mastery of 5 core motivational concepts which result in the internal, or intrinsic, motivation of our teams. Skill 3 is that of Effective Communication. Along with mastering our outlook toward our team, it also involves the skill of active listening and the process of setting clear expectations. 

Role #2 is The Corrector. With employee leadership comes the opportunity to deal with employee challenges. The first skill required to correct challenges with people is that of Coaching for High Performance. This involves how we clarify expectations, engage with our people, and use the Socratic model of correction. Skill #2 is Conflict Resolution. This skill is rooted in a framework that enables us to confront another person without making it personal. Skill #3 is Corrective Counseling. This is a more intense approach to getting a difficult employee back on track. It involves the creation of accountability through a strategic framework of questions. 

Role #3 is The Visionary. This role charts the course for the organization and inspires teams to give the very best of who they are. Skill #1 in this section is Goal Setting and Tracking. This involves the establishment of a vision worth chasing, backed by definite plans of action with measurable outcomes. Skill #2 is Problem Solving. Each of us will face problems along the path to success. Having a 5-Step model for solving any problem, backed by root-cause analysis tools, is fundamental to our success. Skill #3 is Group Decision-Making. Having a model to recognize how decisions are made in a group setting, then following a system that creates predictably positive decisions, is the difference between Good and Great. 

Role #4 is The Transformer. This final role a leader plays is all about making the positive directions work in the long term. Skill #1 is Building High-Performance Teams. This is the process of systematically evolving our teams and developing them through the four stages of team development. Skill #2 is all about building Ethics, Values, and a Great Culture. After all, culture eats strategy for breakfast every day. Skill #3 is Priority Management. This is the process of systematically identifying and eliminating the things that do not move us toward our purpose while making the things that truly matter front and center. 

By developing these skills in your people, which we do through both the Leadership Collaborative as well as through our Leadership Academy, you ensure that your teams can fulfill the four required roles of a leader.