If you ask members of your team to describe the mission and values they witness being lived out in your organization day after day, would the results differ from what’s written on the plaque or in the handbook? Do they know how their daily work furthers the mission and embodies the values?  Would they give you blank stares or an earful? Try taking your team’s pulse by asking the question.  Give them complete freedom to respond candidly without repercussions. The results could be really encouraging or make you sick.  You won’t know until you ask.  Regardless of how it turns out, you’ll know where you stand.  You’ll know whether your team is cohesively pursuing the desired mission, embodying the values and relating their work respectively or whether your actions fail to match up to your words.  If the latter, your customers are probably experiencing the same, so there’s even more urgency…

I’m leading my company, The Karis Group / Kare360, on a quest in 2010 to become a national leader among small business at how we find, interview and train new hires (“FIT” process).  The goal is to become the best in our peer group and to establish The Karis Group as an known, appealing and magnetic employment brand. Why do this?  Well, if we don’t have the best people, we won’t have the best company.  If we don’t have the best company, we won’t be able to deliver the best products and services.  If we don’t make our team better with each hire, at best we idle, at worst we decline compared to our competitors.  People are our business and among the things we have to excel at, to be better at than anyone else, is how we find, interview and train new hires. Consider today how strategic you are throughout…

If you or your colleagues believe you can’t leave work for five days without important responsibilities being neglected, you have a problem.  Unfortunately, many employees work hard to make sure they’re irreplaceable and their companies encourage and support this behavior.  The problem is that this suggests both are investing time and energy into developing responsibility silos rather than developing scalable and replicable systems and processes.  Make yourself irreplaceable, not by ensuring you’re the only one who can do something, but by repeatedly developing systems and processes that can be executed by others. A healthy company leverages its employees to amplify the effect of its systems and processes.  An unhealthy company uses employees as a proxy for systems and processes, so when one of the employees is gone, so is the system and process they represent.  This makes it difficult for employees to take time away from work, planned or unplanned, and makes it…

There are a lot of well qualified and strong character people out there still looking for work.  Depending on the locale and industry, there’s some hiring going on but the opportunities are still slim.  It’s now more important than ever to stand out and convince prospective employers that they need to take a strong look at you.  But how?  Maybe it’s time to try something crazy. What if you identified a handful of companies that you really want to work for and figured out how to do some unsolicited work for them?  Depending on your skills and experience, you could do anything from mystery shopping, developing a competitive analysis, exploring expansion opportunities, assessing social media engagement, reviewing customer policies or anything else that you believe would substantially benefit them and reflect what you’re really good at. Do the work, write it up and deliver it on a compressed deadline.  Give…

Our family visited the Statue of Liberty this past Memorial Day. First off, the monument is impressive and the visit to both Liberty Island and Ellis Island are well worth enduring the long lines. Security is tight at the monument and a Nat’l Park Service employee was at the front of the line. We watched him bark orders, sigh in disgust, reprimand parents and the like. The irony was thick. The messaging around the monument focused on how Lady Liberty was a symbol of hope, a welcoming sight to those yearning for a new life in America. On Monday, one key person made it feel very uninviting especially for foreign visitors who didn’t understand him any better because he was rude or loud. What was his job? He clearly thought it was to establish and maintain control as if he were working a protest line. I submit that his job…

I was speaking with some friends this week about how companies and organizations can be duped by individuals they believe to be one thing, but turn out to be quite another.  Insert your favorite villain here.  From Madoff duping the world of finance to George O’Leary duping Notre Dame (at least for a while), I think the reason why it takes so long for these individuals to be found out is the same: credibility creep. As time passes, credibility creeps when potential employers or customers rely on a due diligence process that only includes a candidate’s more recent employer/customer history.  Since prior employers/customers did the same, if one employer/customer in the chain is duped, it’s likely that subsequent employers/customers will also be duped since they’re relying in part on the due diligence of a prior employer/customer.  This is especially true when the employer/customer list covers a long period of time or contains an marque name. How do you avoid this?  The next time…