Guest Post by Lisa Kosak

Note from Jennifer: I met Lisa at a GRAPE networking event and have enjoyed getting to know her. Lisa has years of “in the trenches” management experience and a true passion for employee engagement, so I invited her to share her leadership thoughts with you. Here, she shares the challenges and benefits of joining a new team as a sales leader.

Starting a new job in a leadership role is always challenging and let’s face it – it can be downright intimidating!  You are the new kid on the block and you need to learn the culture, people, and inner workings of the company – quick!

It’s even more daunting when you’re facing a team of unmotivated or “skill challenged” team members. As a sales and marketing manager transitioning into a new team leadership role, I have found myself in this situation countless times. I needed to connect with the team, earn their trust and respect, and motivate them to produce results. My best strategy for acclimating quickly? Hands down, I have found that empowering employees effectively accomplishes all of these goals and the best part? It’s a win – win ...

Recently, I have been repetitively reinforcing the importance of creating exceptional employee and customer experiences. I’ve talked about the economic benefits that the results produce. I’ve also talked about the correlations between leveraging enabled and engaged employees and the impact that it has on net promoter scores and customer loyalty. And thus, bottom line financial results.

Often times, when people think about enhancing employee or customer experiences they mistakenly think that experience enhancement is going to cost them more money.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Consistently and repeatedly in every industry across the globe I have witnessed that employee and customer experience improvement always coincides with and process improvements and cost reductions.

I have previously written that it is impossible for external experiences to be stronger or better than internal experiences.

That doesn’t mean it takes more time, energy or more financial resources.

When engaged employees consistently do the right thing, the right way, at the right time, for the right reasons, fantastic results follow.

These results include positive impact in ...

Recognize This! – Strategy can only be executed by those who intimately understand strategic objectives and their role in it.

Strategy is one of my passions. I’m fortunate that helping clients formulate strategy is also my job. Indeed, my title is Vice President, Client Strategy and Consulting. I greatly enjoy my work helping organizations of all stripes develop a strategy for proactive management of their company culture. Yet, I also believe that everyone is (or should be) strategist in their organization.

Two pieces on strategy I read last week helped me coalesce my thinking. First, from Strategy + Business comes the ideas of Cynthia Montgomery, Timken Professor of Business Administration and former chair of the strategy unit at Harvard Business School. The article describes Montgomery’s approach to strategy this way:

“When you look at strategy as a frame of mind to be cultivated, rather than as a plan to be executed, you are far more likely to succeed over the long run… To Montgomery, a business strategist is not primarily an analyst of position, or of resources; nor is the strategist purely adaptive, responding reactively to the vagaries of ...

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One of the important insights from the financial fiascos of the last few years is that senior managers and their company can’t always be trusted to act openly or ethically. The consequence of that is writ large: a huge number of people lost their jobs. Indeed, on several occasions, employees who lost their jobs have expressed their frustrations to me about their firm’s practice, telling me that they would never have guessed that of their firm’s leaders.

But then, as the conversation went on, they emphasized that a person at their level couldn’t possibly know what’s going on behind closed doors. Duhhhh. Sometimes we have to be shocked to see what was there all along.

The status of a firm and its managers is not nearly as obscure as many employees think. Furthermore, there are a number of clues to various kinds of financial difficulty or hanky panky that employees at any level can pick up.

Bankruptcy?
Here’s how I got educated on potential corporate bankruptcy. Back in the early ‘nineties, I had a number of long-term, development projects at Sunbeam in Boca Raton. Since a part of my development program involved 360 interviews, I ...