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Make These Smart Moves for a Future Business Handoff or Exit
Every smart move you make in business requires a clear view of the road ahead. That’s especially true whether you’re considering handing off your family business to the next generation or making a good, solid exit from the business you have built.
How Your A-Players Empower Strong Succession Planning
Without A-Players to empower your succession planning, you are building for a dubious future using weak tools. Yes, that’s a rather strong statement. So let me explain just why A-Players are essential for a strong future. Then I’ll give you some insights into how you can make sure you have a lineup of A-Players to power your succession planning engine.
How to Identify Roadblocks to Change and Growth within Your Company
You can feel it at work: that subtle drag against your company’s forward momentum. That dead weight resisting change and growth for your business. But how do you identify the actual roadblocks? How can you pinpoint what’s holding you back?
5 Signs You Excel at Strategizing for Strong Business Growth
Strong business growth strategists come up with plans that brilliantly balance the rate and direction of a company’s growth. Best of all, they use an approach uniquely suited to their organization and its resources, both present and potential. Does this sound like your strategy style? If so, you’re probably leveraging five essential skills to position your company for sustainable business growth.
Yes, Sustained Business Growth is Possible: What You Need to Do Starting Today
Business leaders get tired of settling for minor revenue increases without long-term, sustained business growth. Yet changing a company’s established approach to business “growth” can feel like confronting an unassailable fortress. Unfortunately, fortresses don’t advance. And neither will a business, as long as short-sighted practices remain unexamined. So let’s look at the growth problem through a different lens.
Are You Ready to Put AI to Work Growing Your Business?
If you shop online, use a banking app, scroll social media, or search with Google, you know firsthand how adept AI algorithms are at predicting your behavior, answering your questions, and dishing up attractive options. They perform this feat based on the vast reservoir of data at their disposal. In the business world, AI is doing this all the time, and not just for the Fortune 500 companies, or the companies that are building their own AI technology. The fact is, AI is hard at work right now sculpting the way all businesses will operate, engage with customers, and make strategic decisions in the future.
Succession Planning: How to Set Your Business Up for Long-Term Success
Businesses with an effective succession plan hardly miss a beat when leaders leave—whether they leave on schedule or unexpectedly, and only 35% of businesses have succession plans in place. Further, of those businesses that have implemented succession plans, most have only done so for the CEO position.
The 7 Fundamentals of Business Turnaround: Strategies for Success
In this fast-paced world, where business landscapes can change in the blink of an eye, a well-crafted turnaround plan becomes the linchpin between survival and failure. When the going gets tough, a fresh perspective from the outside can work wonders in helping you refocus on the core principles that can steer your business back to success.
Being Coachable for Business Success
I spent last week in London where I had the pleasure of attending Wimbledon with my wife and some close friends. Undoubtedly these players are gifted athletes but without the guidance of a good coach would they make the changes necessary to reach the top? It is the same in business.
Demise of the Top-Down Model: 3 Rules for Employee Engagement
During my recent travels to California as a CEO and leadership team coach, I read a Gallup article about productivity that echoed my sentiments about the future of business leadership. In past generations, management was about control. In general, managers could be counted on to be senior staff members; their experience was comprised of hard earned knowledge about company processes and procedures, and good leadership was based on enforcing these.
The Gift of Feedback
I recently spoke to YPO Guatemala, in Guatemala City, which was a great experience. I shared with them a three hour interactive workshop on leadership succession planning. What made it a great experience was their willingness to participate fully in the discussion and group exercises as well as their warm generosity in the way that they hosted me while in Guatemala.
7 Signs You May be a Bad Boss
Nobody likes to think of themselves as a bad boss. But in my travels through the leadership keynote speaker world, I’ve met so many current and aspiring leaders. And whether they’re newly minted managers or seasoned C-suite types, regardless of their leadership tenure, it’s quite common for people to have a few blind spots around their own leadership styles.
Cherishing Personal & Business Relationships
February is the peak of downhill ski season and the time of year when I enjoy spending as many days as I can on the slopes. I try to combine my passion for skiing with the opportunity to spend time with people whose company I enjoy and find stimulating. This past month I was fortunate to rekindle some old friendships with some close friends I haven’t seen in several years.
Recession-Proofing Your Business
Navigating Your Business through Challenging Economic Times – In this episode, we welcome entrepreneur, author and leadership expert Richard J. Bryan to offer his expertise on ways to recession-proof your business.
The Value of Retaining Talent in a Competitive Market
As a family business owner, you may be feeling pressure to reduce staff, but the old adage that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush is particularly apt when it comes to your employees. Despite the concerns about inflation and the push for layoffs, the companies that keep staff on the payroll will have a distinct advantage.
Developing Successful Leaders in the Family Business: 3 Tips for Creating Positive Outcomes
It’s easy to think of succession planning as something that happens at the end of an era. But for a family business to survive and hopefully one day thrive, it’s actually a lifelong process that should be running in the background at all times—and coming into the foreground during key transitions. With this in mind, here are three essential tips to ensure you’re setting the next generation of leaders up for success in the way of family succession planning.
How to Stand Out as a Leader in Succession Planning
Within the next 10 years Boomers will have all but handed over the reins of corporate leadership to succeeding generations. Whether you’re running a family business or joining the ranks of a public enterprise, more than 75% of the workforce will be Millennials. This is likely the biggest leadership handover the corporate world has seen to date, and companies large and small are wisely making preparations. I’ve been working with my clients to create unique strategies that work within the realms of their family businesses – here are six strategies on how to stand out as a leader.
4 Tips for Developing Your Company’s Future
As a succession planning keynote speaker and author, I talk a lot about Millennials in the marketplace, who comprise half the current U.S. workforce and expected to reach 75% over the next five years. But recently, I’ve begun to field questions about preparing the next generation of leaders during this incredibly pivotal time. Today, with the oldest in this massive and complex demographic turning 40, and already exploring the upper echelons of leadership, the NEXT generation of leaders are just now entering the workforce.
Lessons from the British Royal Family About Long-term Succession Planning
Watching the pomp and circumstance that the British do so well, I was struck by how perfectly organized everything was down to the minutest detail. This does not happen without a lot of forward planning, preparation, and practice. When I am speaking as a succession planning keynote speaker or advising a coaching client about the future leadership of their business, I always tell them that starting early and planning long term are crucial for a smooth transition from one generation to the next.
Leadership During Crisis: 7 Qualities That Make a Survivor
There’s nothing like a legitimate crisis for teaching business leaders what they’re really made of. As someone whose early days in the family business were defined by crisis leadership, I could not agree more.
But I didn’t do it alone. The leadership during adversity in question was delivered by my mentor, business turnaround specialist Frank
Rise of the Virtual Boss: 5 Tips for Effective Remote Leadership
During the past couple of years, we have had to become comfortable working from home—while also trying to balance family life, and possibly looking after someone who has been sick or has become more vulnerable. This is quite a change for many who were used to their daily commute into the office, where they had a clear distinction between home and work life as a virtual boss.