Does your organization face these issues?

Your team is responsible for a significant challenge — in corporate jargon-ese, that would be a mission-critical initiative. It might be one of those projects that comes around every few years — and fails every few years.

You’re determined it’s not going to fail on your watch. And you’re overwhelmed with the political issues facing you. Communication, team dynamics, motivation, buy-in from your peers, risk management ... and oh, yes, there’s the actual work to be done too.

The most talented and promising employees always have one eye out for their next opportunity. Given the high cost of turnover (up to 200% of annual salary for highly-skilled employees), it’s understandable that talent management, employee retention and engagement, and loyalty development are the current hot buzzwords.

How do you find the time, energy, and ideas to support your team’s career satisfaction and still ?

You’ve gone from struggling start-up to proudly profitable and growing. You’ve heard horror stories of companies that grew too big too fast, toppling under their own success.

You want to grow right, smart and sustainable. How do you find the objectivity to know what that looks like?

With people scattered across the globe, scheduling meetings is a time-zone nightmare. Then there are the remote employees who feel left out, and local employees who wonder what the remote people are up to.

How can you effectively create a common goal, group motivation, and a sense of teamwork without the luxury of face-to-face meetings?

Even in trying economic times, you know that employee retention, development, and engagement are crucial. Keeping a diverse workforce motivated, developing leaders to effectively take over from senior management as they retire — it’s a complicated, multi-layered, multi-dimensional problem.

So-called “soft skills” are becoming a greater and greater focus in business schools and training programs everywhere. What’s the best way to bring them into your organization? As a leader and manaager yourself, how do you model, teach, and emphasize the importance of these skills?

Sometimes you feel like you’re managing a madhouse instead of a team of professionals. They’re strong, talented people, but they can’t seem to get along or stay focused. You’ve gotten so much experience in negotiation, you’re starting to dream about a job as a United Nations peacemaker.

How do you keep the power struggles and destructive politics from taking a toll on everyone and affecting the quality and delivery of work?

The company’s growing, challenging competitors and winning profitable new business. You’re hiring great people with exciting ideas. And the old-timers are frustrated and resentful.

Charting a course through this critical phase of growth sometimes feels like bushwhacking up the Amazon: trackless, sweaty, and dangerous.

My corporate clients are:

Publicly held and privately owned.

Startups wanting to start out right.

Young companies stepping from “troubled adolescence” into sustainable success.

Small and family-owned on up to major multi-national players.

They come from a range of industries and backgrounds:

Technology
Finance
Insurance and re-insurance
Academia
Pharmaceutical
Psychology and human response research
Journalism
Environmental research and testing

Will this work for your organization?

The organizations and leaders I work with aspire to these values:

People matter — not just because everyone says so, but in tangible ways that provide growth opportunities for every employee with talent and initiative.

Profitability with a conscience — senior leadership is aware of the benefits and costs of their business choices. They won’t sacrifice organizational principles for a profit.

Quality matters — quality of your products and services and of the workplace experience.

Growth is a given — growth in profitability and bottom-line results, growth for individual employees, and growth in the responsiveness and responsibility of the organization.

Management fads are avoided — solutions to internal growth pangs and issues are chosen with attention to the real problem, not selected from the current popular silver-bullet approaches.

If this seems intriguing, take a look at how your definition of office politics is affecting your career, your organization, and your life by signing up for my free workbook, “The Five Deadly Shoulds of Office Politics that Maul, Mangle, and Murder Careers (and what to do about them).”

Want to know more? Here’s an overview of how my process fits into the organizations I work with.