Teams must grow; teams cannot be simply appointed and anointed. We may have a designated group that evolves into a team, but this emergent phenomenon takes time. It takes time to discover the strengths and weakness if each member of the group, understanding that ultimately transforms into trust, the backbone value/concept for any successful team. […]

We have never seen a meaningful employee evaluation system. The abominations are generally designed as a tool to assess the performance of the employee with respect to corporate goals. When they present the illusion of quantification, the values are really qualitative and they will inflate over time as people are ‘soft’ about providing ‘real’ assessment. […]

Ideally, the human resources function or department represents the employee to management and management to the employee. Sadly, in our experience, most human resources people are inclined to support the individuals who sign their paycheck and the employees are left swinging in the breeze. It is no wonder that employees will gravitate towards collective bargaining […]

Many raindrops make an ocean. We have seen a divisional vice-president sneer at a small cost reduction and tell us it was not Six Sigma material. We didn’t care, because permitting small cost reductions makes the practice part of the culture while still adding benefits to the firm. We have already shown in another blog […]

We have heard executive complain when an employee they put through external training left the company to pursue a better-paying job somewhere else. Our question has always been “Why didn’t you take care of your investment?” Training employees is an investment of time and money in much the same way as tilling and seeding the […]

Are you tired of training that is mostly blather from the speaker/teacher/trainer? We use techniques that eliminate this issue. For example, we are fond of “training games” that allow our clients to get some person-to-person and hands on activity. We also ask you to work examples of the kind of material we are training on; […]