Leadership
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Eight Leadership Mistakes: #2 – Not Doing What You Say You Were Going to Do
- March 14, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
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A recent article, Eight Mistakes Leaders Make That Kill Employee Trust, briefly discussed different management shortcomings and problems that we may unknowingly have or use, which can ruin employees’ respect for us. I wanted to address each of these mistakes and help you learn how to avoid them. The original title of this leadership mistake
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Eight Leadership Mistakes: #1 – Not Asking for Help
- March 7, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
A recent article, Eight Mistakes Leaders Make That Kill Employee Trust, briefly discussed different management shortcomings and problems that we may unknowingly have or use, which can ruin employees’ respect for us. I wanted to address each of these mistakes and help you learn how to avoid them. This week, the first post, is about
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What Owning a Business in South Africa Taught Me About Managing Diverse Groups
- February 21, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management
Years ago, at the start of my career, I worked in the fencing manufacturing and construction business. I manufactured a chain link fence and installed it myself too. That was in Durban, South Africa in the 1970s, when it was a different time and place. I just came back from a visit to South Africa
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The World Shouldn’t Change for Millennials, They’re Going to Have to Change for It
- January 24, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
Okay, I’m going to say something that’s going to upset 75.4 million people in this country: I don’t think the work world should change for Millennials, I think they’re going to have to change for it. Maybe I’m being a curmudgeon, and I’m sure there are many people who will tell me that the world
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Make Smart Layoffs With Objective Measurement
- December 27, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Measurement
While I never had to make any layoffs in my career, I’ve seen them happen, and often without any real plan to help the company further. I can say that while I’ve never done a layoff in my own career, I have reduced the workforce to help it run at peak efficiency, like firing third
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Leaders Can Lead More People Through Measurement
- December 20, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Measurement
I sometimes think we have too many middle managers clogging up the business world. I look at companies that do big layoffs of their middle managers and wonder if they were actually that effective to begin with. If a company decides they can do away with 20 percent of their workforce, and the managers are
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Industrial Engineering is a Lost Art
- November 22, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Manufacturing
This month’s blog posts seem to be all about remote work. And this week isn’t any different because I was thinking about my friend, Bob Blair. Bob is a retired industrial engineer, who only ever came out of retirement to do some work for me and Robroy. Otherwise, he spends half the year in Canada
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How Do You Recover From a Devastating Incident?
- October 25, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership
Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve had to fire a lot of people over the years, usually related to performance issues. But in the 21 years I was president of the company, I never had a layoff. That was one of my precepts of managing a business: I believed layoffs were really a
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How Do You Keep Up Company Morale?
- October 18, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management, Measurement
Company morale can have more dramatic rises and falls than a roller coaster. You’ll have your seasonal ebbs and flows, highs before a big product launch, lows after a major crisis or periods of poor performance, as well as the occasional holiday-related highs. But you can also have pockets of high and low morale throughout
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Four Steps I Took to Lower Our Workers Comp Costs
- September 20, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Safety
Workers Compensation is the bane of most employers, a much-hated tax they have to pay in order to support workers who get injured on the job. And the opportunities for fraud are so prevalent that just mentioning the phrase “Workers Comp” is enough to make any executive see red. But I managed to reduce our