I had the opportunity last week to attend the monthly meeting of my local chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management, which covered a legislative update for its membership. I am from a family of lawyers so I understand they have a role to play. But every time I come away with the same feeling.

For over 30 years when I attend these it always seems to be the case of us against them. The lawyers tell us that we have to begin to develop strategies to combat the rash of…

If we look back in time, we find that whether you call it HR or personnel it has always it seems been our job to put out fires. It has always been our job to be the go to person when a problem needs to be resolved. That means that we respond to a given issue, at a given time, in a given space. This means that we are transactional in nature. Dictionary.com defines transactional as the process of carrying on or conducting (business, negotiations, activities etc.) to a conclusion or settlement.…

The United States as a country is losing its way. Many global businesses are losing their way. The educational system is losing its way. This is not the prelude to some political office campaign. This is a fact of life.  We have become accustomed to becoming in essence, a nation of robots. By the nature of this attitude we are condemning our organizations to a period of a lack of innovation and making our businesses great.

When we are brought into this world we learn by experimenting.…

Commandment #1: Thou shalt become one with the customer/client internally or externally

Commandment #2: Thou shalt remember that the customer is the one that pays the bills

Commandment #3: Thou shalt become engaged in constant communications to all stakeholders

Commandment #4: Thou shalt never stop questioning everything

Commandment #5: Thou shalt never end the improvement process because you think that you solved the problem…

In this final installment in this four part series we have reached the step, which the TLS Continuum looks at the Six Sigma segment of the process. We have to this point looked at the problem, developed our metrics and the voice of the customer, and introduced potential solutions to the organization and the stakeholders. In this final stage we now roll out the solution to the entire organization and our customer database.

The intent of this stage is two fold. The first is that we…

In last week’s blog I discussed the response to What if? What does our future organization look like to the marketplace? By doing this we have established the gap analysis between what the customer wants and what we are providing to them. In this next installment we look at the introduction of solutions to resolve the gap that resulted from the analysis. When we combine the design tools with the improve stage of the TLS Continuum, we discover a clear roadmap for showing the customer what we…

In last week’s blog I discussed the response to the question What Is? The intent was to present you some tools on how to determine what your organization looks like in its current state. It is that determination which leads to the rest of the process.

Ogilvie and Liedtka, in their book Designing for Growth: A…

Welcome to the first of four posts that explore the interconnection between design thinking and the TLS Continuum. It is a dynamic way to understand your customer and your customer’s expectations. This first installment is critical to the success of the process improvement effort since we need to understand the problem in its basic manifestation.

We begin this journey by understanding that the ultimate outcome is going to affect people. The changes you make in the long run are going…

I have written extensively in this blog series about the power of the TLS Continuum in your organization. Like most of you I read the professional media and books to stay on top of what is going on in our industry. Every now and then you come across a concept which changes your whole focus or makes your mind run a mile a minute. I have just such a concept in two things I have read recently. The first was an article written by Tim Brown and Roger Martin in article titled…

Your organization believes that there is a problem with the organization, so the tendency is to try and repair everything at one. While on the surface that may see like the right direction for the organization, this approach seldom meets the end goal. This segment of the TLS Continuum Blog Series suggests that there are 10 commandments to selecting projects that will bring the most benefit to you and your organization.

 Thou shalt become one with the…

If you watch the media and social postings there a lot of comments about why process improvement efforts fail. The reasons for excuses run a wide gamut. I would suggest there is a more fundamental reason for improvement efforts that fail. We have the wrong focus. I am not suggesting that the problems are the wrong focus instead I am suggesting that the problem is how we look…

I was reading the Summer 2016 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review in which an article appeared by Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden titled “What Makes Work Meaningful or Meaningless.” The article gave me some pause for thought as to why cross functional teams sometimes failure to reach the goals that they have set.

My response is that these teams fail because we have not properly…

Your organizations has committed to improving your processes, however you have left out a critical part of the equation. No process improvement effort tis going to succeed without the input from a cross-functional team which looks at both the current and future state of the process within the organization.

In order for a cross-functional team to be successful there…

I am still in the process of reading Your Place at the Table by Allan Cox. Throughout the book Allan Cox centers his message on seven signs of authenticity. Considering the events of the last 48 hours a couple of these signs appear to stick out more than others.

The need…

I am currently in the process of reading Your Place at the Table by Allan Cox.  It consists of a series of short essays, which discuss the concept of Authenticity. In one of these essays Allan Cox defines empowerment, as “I love you for what I am when I am with you.”

In my weekly tip of the week on Wednesday we…

You are a member of management of your organization and you have an employee who Is not performing to the level that the organization requires, so what do you do? If you re like many managers your immediate response is to talk to the employee about how to change their work habits in order to achieve your goal.

I recently attended a meeting of the local SHRM chapter in which the presenter made the point that management coaching is not what we think it is. It was an interesting…

On a fairly frequent basis I hear hiring managers make the statement that “when interviewing new candidates I try and find someone who is just like me to bring into the organization.” I can understand the tendency to do so. If they are just like the hiring manager there is likely to be less of a down time while they get acclimated to the organization. If they are just like…

Turn on the news or read the newspaper and you will see stories about teenagers complaining that they are being bullied in the schools, on the streets etc. These stories bring about almost immediate consternation from the public in the form of twitter posts, Facebook posts etc. In every case the predominant message is that this is wrong and needs to stop. The flip side is that we do not see that same outrage when it is management acting in the role of the bully in the workplace.

In…

My blog post from last week stressed that we should not measure for the sake of measuring. The same concept goes for determining what projects to begin. I do not care whether you are an IBM or the corner mom and pop store, you do not have the capacity to take on every project that may be needed to resolve obstacles within the organization. So if we can’t undertake everything how do we make the value of the projects understood by the organization as a whole?

Taking a page from last…

Every day in every organization management from the boardroom to the C-Suite is demanding that we produce metrics to determine how the organization is functioning. The common demand is that we measure something. In his book Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top…