Can you list the emotions your customers want? Are you right?

Culture Master Class

The game of business is not about finishing. It is about finding and continuously delivering value to customers. You role is now to work with your teams to find ways to sniff out ideas from customers (and your teams), to be constantly focused on testing or validating what value is in these ideas (by talking with customers and getting something in their hands to try), and to relentlessly work with your teams to shorten cycle times (innovation (idea) to test (value validation) to release (customer).

Business is about Customer Experience. How do your customers feel while engaging with you? How do they feel when they think about you? How do they feel after they have engaged with you? How does your product or service make them feel? Do you frustrate your customers anywhere on their journey? Do you slow them down? Do you confuse them? Do you make it hard for them to buy from you or engage with you?

Continue reading Can you list the emotions your customers want? Are you right?

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Culture Master Class Series:

Try this today. It will start to foster a culture of ‘one-team’, a culture of learning, and importantly a culture or delivering value to customers.

Here is one ‘simple’ change you can learn to make that will mature your thinking from manager to leader and start creating a culture of ‘Trust, Truth & Transparency’.

Managers ask the three questions: ‘What will I get?’, ‘ When will I get it?’ and ‘What will it cost?’. These questions come a need to satisfy a short-term ‘lust for certainty’ – a satisfaction that is usually short lived.

Sadly these questions are not usually answered clearly – leading to a breakdown in trust, truth and transparency.

These questions come from a belief that value is released at the end of a set of tasks. This is old school thinking. Inspirational leaders know that value is streamed to customers, driven by customers and should only end when customers are no longer seeing value.

Continue reading Culture Master Class Series:

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Bring The Spirit Of Leadership Back

It’s not a time of change, it’s a time of challenge. ‘Fast Change’ and the rise of knowledge work means it’s time to empower employees to take more initiative and voice their ideas in a time of better-informed customers. As leaders we must all avoid becoming stuck in the wrong gear and at the wrong time. But, the biggest challenge of all will be keeping our organizations young, fresh and current, that’s why we need Robust Leadership in place.

Problem 1. During our recent investigation into performance management, it became obvious that in many organizations the performance and operational processes are often in a bad shape and in need of an overhaul, often inadequate and out-of-line with today’s market demands if the organization is to survive, let alone thrive, in the new economy. In a nutshell they managed the wrong behaviours (metrics) and drive the wrong behaviors we are now asking of our leaders (emerging and existing).

Problem 2. With that in mind. The necessity to increase the value of all employees and executives is now urgent. So, how do we improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the human-side of Organizations needed for the future of business? 

So, where has the spirit of leadership gone? Where is the Robust Leadership Australia so urgently needs? We want it, we talk about it, but we are not doing it.

Continue reading Bring The Spirit Of Leadership Back

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Leadership Series: Wake Up With A Sense Of Purpose

This is one of my core principles. Everyday I work hard to ensure that members of my team can wake up with a sense of purpose. It sounds easy, but like most things in leadership – it’s difficult.

It’s a big goal to set. I try and achieve it every day – and to be honest I don’t always succeed. That’s why this is a team task. During the retros and during my walks and conversations with people, I ask and collect information that will help me work out how to make everyone ‘wake up with a sense of purpose’.

This is how we put a bounce in our team mates step, how we make them want to jump out of bed in the morning and how we inspire them to bring their best to work.

Continue reading Leadership Series: Wake Up With A Sense Of Purpose

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Leadership Tip: Inspiring Your Team

I was working with a client the other day and was asked how we attract such great talent to our projects.  “Steve, you always seem to have the motivated team, the stars… that makes delivery easy”

Whilst attracting bright talent is a focus of mine (who doesn’t want to work with bright people?), we work hard at it, we also work hard at keeping them and maintaining the motivation.

Our underlying philosophy is pretty simple and is broken down into three points that anyone can use. Continue reading Leadership Tip: Inspiring Your Team

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

How to get people to innovate

My plane from Sydney has just been delayed 4 hours.  I’ve just finished up facilitating a day long workshop with a high energy client.  My brain is alive with ideas, i’m pumped, so what better time to write a blog on innovation.

Ok, i’m going to correct myself right here.  You don’t GET people to innovate.  As a leader you create an environment where innovation, ideas and suggestions are the norm.  Then, using the right ‘tools’ you stimulate and capture innovation.

Innovation, sadly its a term that has been used to death, but I hope that it never loses its importance in peoples priorities.

The days of having an idea then milking the market for 20 years with the same idea are all-but-gone.  Companies, and now Governments need to continually be coming up with better ways to do what they do, continually changing what they do, testing, ditching the failures, leveraging the wins and trying again.

… but how to do embed a culture of innovation through our your team, your department, division or enterprise?

I have implemented what I call the ‘Innovation To Implementation Cycle’ which has consistently shown great results – it is not easy to implement, but if you don’t…

I’m going to put some Continue reading How to get people to innovate

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

I’m Worried About Customer Experience

Customer experience is the latest buzz word, as popular as … a cold beer on a hot day… and rightly so, delivering what your customers want in a saturated market place is a smart way to stand out and compete, that’s exactly why I created Emotional Based Design… a tool for everyone to do just that.

But… Continue reading I’m Worried About Customer Experience

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Customer Not Digital Transformation

Having just completed arguably the #1 transformation in Australia (possibly the world) I have learnt (the hard way) a thing or two about what to focus on.

In a published whitepaper from the Gartner Group, our transformation was called “Exemplary Public-Sector Digital Service Model”

Vivek Kundra (ex US Fed CIO for Barack Obama) said “The mistake you guys have made is this… you think you are #1 in Australia; I want to tell you, what you have done here… you are #1 in the world”

A couple of proud moments (yep, I tell everyone!) for our team.

What is interesting here is the language used.  Gartner didn’t call it a digital transformation.  They called it a Digital Service Model… because that is what it is.  In reality it is a Customer Service Transformation (underpinned by digital channels and technology).

I have met with over 40 institutions who are getting ready to start their transformation journey.  95% of these were focusing on the technology and not the customer.

Digital Transformation – The process of using new technologies to become more innovative, agile, and above-all else, customer-centric.

Don’t ever forget, Continue reading Customer Not Digital Transformation

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Leadership Tip Achieve

No-one likes a long running task.  Day after day, coming in to work to do more of the long running task.  Its a demoraliser…

I teach teams an agile/SCRUM trick, and that is to create your tasks so they can be completed within one day.  This way you go home with a sense of achievement, not dread!

Impossible you say… well let me explain a bit more.  I don’t mean Continue reading Leadership Tip Achieve

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Dirty Agile

The other morning I was a guest presenter (I really don’t like that word… I interacted with people) at a breakfast with Deloitte in Brisbane.  The topic was, agile, how I’ve implemented it and the results achieved at my latest client.

Half way through this session I chuckled to myself and coined the phrase ‘dirty agile’ – agile from the trenches.  Since then I have received a lot of interest in dirty agile.

The term dirty agile reflects scrum after many retrospectives.  The flavor of agile that we now run throughout this program can be clearly traced back to the manifesto principles and you can see its roots are in SCRUM, however it fits the organisation, their risk tolerance and low project maturity very well.

Jeff Sutherland – the founder of SCRUM explains that SCRUM is ‘onboarding for agile’.  It is a set of ‘rules’ to get you going, it is not Continue reading Dirty Agile

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.