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Leadership Inspirations – Team Commitment

“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”

Vince Lombardi (1913 – 1970)
Green Bay Packers Head Coach from 1959 to 1967,
winning five league championships during these nine years

Following his death in September 1970, the NFL’s ‘World Championship Game Trophy’ was renamed the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Each year, the trophy is presented to the winner of the Super Bowl.

StrategyDriven Podcast Episode 30 – The Cost of Not Engaging Employees

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Episode 30 – The Cost of Not Engaging Employees explores the cost of not engaging employees; revealing why this business imperative can have as significant a return on investment as most other strategic initiatives. During our discussion, Michael Lee Stallard, author of Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team’s Passion, Creativity, and Productivity and co-Founder and President of E Pluribus Partners, shares with us his insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • the definition of employee engagement and what truly engaged employees ‘look like’
  • quantitative level of employee engagement at the average organization
  • why so many employees are not engaged or not aligned with their organization’s strategy
  • activities and costs to develop and maintain an engaged workforce
  • other qualitative improvements higher employee engagement yields and the typical impact these improvements have on organizational performance

Additional Information

In addition to the incredible insights Michael shares in Fired Up or Burned Out and this edition of the StrategyDriven Podcast are the resources accessible from his website, www.FiredUpOrBurnedOut.com.   Michael’s Connection Culture Manifesto can be downloaded for free by clicking here. His book, Fired Up or Burned Out, can be purchased by clicking here.

A special gift for StrategyDriven readers…

We are pleased to announce that Michael has made the electronic version of his book, Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team’s Passion, Creativity, and Productivity, available for download at no cost to our readers. Simply click on the link above to download your copy of this remarkable book on how to better engage employees; igniting their creativity, imagination, and spirits to the success of the organization.

Final Request…

The strength of our community grows with the additional insights brought by our expanding member base. Please consider rating us on iTunes by clicking here. Rating the StrategyDriven Podcast and providing your comments online improves our ranking and helps us attract new listeners which, in turn, helps us grow our community.

Thank you again for listening to the StrategyDriven Podcast!


About the Author

Michael Lee Stallard, author of Fired Up or Burned Out, is co-Founder and President of E Pluribus Partners, a consulting firm specializing in helping leaders create ‘Connection Cultures’ to form strong bonds among the management, employees, and customers of an organization. Michael’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Leader to Leader, Human Resource Executive, and Fox Business Now. He has spoken at conferences organized by The Conference Board, GE, Google, NASA, Johnson & Johnson and Yale-New Haven Hospital. To read Michael’s full biography, click here.

Decision-Making Warning Flag 1c – ad hominem: Personal, Not Issue Attacks

StrategyDriven Decision Making Article | ad hominem“An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: “argument to the man”, “argument against the man”) consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim. The process of proving or disproving the claim is thereby subverted, and the argumentum ad hominem works to change the subject.

It is most commonly used to refer specifically to the ad hominem abusive, or argumentum ad personam, which consists of criticizing or attacking the person who proposed the argument (personal attack) in an attempt to discredit the argument. It is also used when an opponent is unable to find fault with an argument, yet for various reasons, the opponent disagrees with it.”

Ad Hominem
Wikipedia

The ‘Old Boys Club’

Product defects plague a company’s profitability; warranty repairs, returns, and lost sales robbing the organization of its already slim profit margins. Executives assembled an engineering team to assess product designs and material quality in hopes of identifying a root cause to the defective product issue. A junior member of the assessment team, a young, recently hired assembly line supervisor, identifies the lack of routine calibration of critical cutting tools as a contributor to the poor fit of key product components. The tenured company engineers on the team discount the supervisor’s observation because he’s too young and too new to know what’s really important. These senior engineers have just made an ad hominem argument to advance their position.

Ad hominem arguments are bias-based logic fallacies made to support business decisions every day. As with all logic errors, decision-makers fall prey to the appearance of reasonableness, especially when the assertion supports their desired course of action. Although difficult, recognizing and eliminating the use of ad hominem arguments in decision-making is absolutely necessary.


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Additional Information

Additional insight to the warning signs, causes, and results of logic errors can be found in the StrategyDriven website feature: Decision-Making Warning Flag 1 – Logic Fallacies Introduction.

Insights on organizational diversity and inclusion can be found in the StrategyDriven topical area: Diversity and Inclusion.

Hitting Curveballs: Today’s most important business skill

You may be an inspiring leader able to rally and unite dispirited and divided individuals. You could be a brilliant visionary able to invent innovative products and services. Or you might be a compelling communicator able to charm investors and captivate customers. Possessing any one of these talents would make you a business all-star in the past. But today, it will only mark you as a phenom: someone with potential. To become a business hall of famer – a proven long term winner – you need to show that you know how to hit a curveball: how to confront and regularly overcome the unexpected.

Hitting curveballs has become the indispensable skill for long term business survival, not just success, in the current economic environment. If you want to make the majors and have a future either in a corporate structure, as an entrepreneur, or as an independent professional, you need to be able to deal with unanticipated events and scenarios. The unexpected has always occurred, and business leaders have always had to deal with it. However, things really are different today because of four distinct but interconnected trends.


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About the Author

Scott R. Singer has spent the past 20 years advising companies on how to adapt to change, to embrace technological advances, and to put the best strategy in place to deal with the next big thing – essentially, teaching them how to hit curveballs. A noted media industry expert, investment banker, and strategy consultant, Scott serves as Managing Director and Head of Media & Entertainment at The Bank Street Group, a boutique investment banking firm focused on providing sophisticated advice regarding mergers & acquisitions; fairness opinions; private debt, equity, and venture capital raising; as well as bankruptcies, restructurings, and turnarounds to telecommunications, media, technology, aerospace & defense, and healthcare companies. Scott is regularly called on by Bloomberg, CNBC, FOX Business, Reuters and numerous publications such as, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, CNNMoney.com, Crain’s New York Business, and Forbes.com in addition to many other industry publications as a media expert to address various domestic and global topics. To read Scott’s complete biography, click here.

Leadership Inspirations – Face the Opposition

“This week, stand toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye with the opposition to your success and say, ‘You won’t stop me. My destiny is victory and my birthname, winner. Bring it!'”

Howard T. Dickens Jr.