Seminar #3: Strengthen Management Excellence

This seminar is part of The Seminars on Excellence — a comprehensive approach to strengthening excellence throughout an organization.

Excellence is doing the best you can at whatever you’re doing while simultaneously learning how to do it better the next time.

Management Excellence is converting resources into results that help your organization to the best of your ability while learning how to do it better the next time.

Offerings

Dan Coughlin teaches how to strengthen management excellence in the following ways:

  • Half-Day Workshop
  • Full-Day Seminar
  • Two-Day Retreat
  • Webinar

Content

Understand your management method (how you personally convert resources into results)

Understand your personal resources that you can convert into results

  • Your terms
  • Your time
  • Your choices
  • Your integrity
  • Your capacity to earn results
  • Your knowledge and know-how

People selection, placement, and development

  • Clarify what you are looking for in a new employee
  • Create customized interview questions, case studies, and role plays to find the type of people you want in your organization.
  • Your future depends on who you select
  • Assemble your team intentionally and carefully
  • Develop standards of excellence in all employees

Values (beliefs that a person considers to be so important that they drive the person’s behaviors on a consistent basis)

Culture (the beliefs people across an organization consider to be so important that they drive behaviors on a consistent basis throughout the organization)

  • Culture is represented by the stories we tell
  • Every employee should be able to explain the culture conversationally

Master the fundamentals of communication (Communication 1.0)

  • I think through what I want to say.
  • I clearly and completely say in a timely manner what I meant to say.
  • The other person hears and understands what I said.
  • The other person thinks through what he or she wants to say.
  • The other person clearly and completely says in a timely manner what he or she meant to say.
  • I hear and understand what the other person said.

Master the fundamentals of empathy (Communication 2.0)

  • Empathy is working to understand what another person is thinking and feeling, and then responding appropriately.

The mother of all power tools: simplify

Strategy (defines the type of organization you have and what it will do to achieve the desired results)

  • Avoid the trap of focusing on what was rather than on what is
  • What seed belief is your organization based on?
  • What business are you in?
  • Depend on a concept, not a customer
  • Why you need a sustainable business philosophy
  • Why us and why not us?

Tactics (how do we bring value to customers)

Planning (general objectives with specific measurable indicators of success)

Lead (influence how other people think so they make decisions on how to improve results in a sustainable way)

Execution (planned actions with timelines and assigned responsibilities)

  • Execution means accomplishing what you planned
  • Who is going to do what when and why is that going to happen?

Brand (the value customers think they receive when buying a certain product, service, or experience. A brand is also the value potential customers think they will receive if they buy a certain product, service, or experience)

  • Every employee should be able to explain your brand conversationally
  • The language of brands
  • Build a magnet
  • Maintain breadth and depth
  • Be really, really good at what you do
  • Stay calm and have fun
  • You never know who will open a door for you or how big the room will be
  • Build your brand from the outside-in and the inside-out
  • Strengthen YOUR brand in YOUR community
  • Do the messages you send into the marketplace match what you want to be known for as an organization?
  • Feed your brand every day (brand-feeding approaches to improve your sales)
  • Apply the Value Formula every day
  • How promises affect brands

Innovation (improving the value that people inside and outside the organization receive)

  • Value is the improved outcome a person achieves as a result of using a certain product or service
  • Continually innovate to generate sustainable, profitable growth
  • Optimize the conditions for great innovations
  • Working in the Creativity Age
  • The advantages of disadvantges, how challenges propel great performances
  • Build your hub to sustain success

The Process of Innovation

  • What outcome are we trying to improve and why did we select that outcome?
  • What are we doing now to achieve the results we are currently achieving?
  • What is working well in terms of achieving our desired results, why is it working well, and why should we keep doing it?
  • How could we do what is working well and make it even better? (evolution)
  • What is not working well in terms of achieving our desired results, and why should we stop doing it?
  • What is not working well that we need to do differently, what do we need to do differently, and why should we do that? (revolution)

The Cycle of Innovation

  • The Incubator Phase (store a lot of ideas)
  • The Small Test Phase (test one idea on a small basis, then either discard or improve)
  • The Large Test Phase (test one idea on a large basis, discard or improve)
  • The Rollout Phase (rollout one idea across the whole area of the business, then either discard or improve)

The power of a single great idea

Think inside the box

  • What is effective production, innovation, and branding?

The illusion of control

Understand other people and meet their needs

  • How they process ideas
  • What they are inclined to do
  • How they make decisions

Give eulogies at work

Create an environment where motivated, competent people can succeed

Know how to get great performances out of other people

Competitive Strategies vs Competitive Behaviors

The wide wonderful world of feedback

Why shortcuts ruin results

Pride, a core value for achieving excellence

Sustain patience, sustain effort, sustain learning

Convert past successes into future successes

Sacrifice wasting energy