What are Company Values and How do you Create Them?

We’ve been spending some time here at The Point Blog highlighting some of our company values.  But what exactly do we mean by company values and how do you form them?  Many people, I believe, misinterpret what organizational values are and should be. This leads leaders to stay away from setting them, limiting their ability to drive organizational competitiveness through a common company language and culture. So, organizational values are:  Not moral in nature. They aren’t right or wrong in a universal sense.   They are however, right or wrong for your organization. They should be guiding principles that govern behavior.  They should

8 Ways to Display a People First Mindset

We’ve been working on training to help people implement  tactical ways to demonstrate a “People First” or relationship-driven mindset.  It started out as something to meet a need for a retail client and has turned into a professional development topic for an entirely different industry. In a world where every business is trying to figure out a way to distinguish themselves and create a competitive advantage, treating people like people is a good a place as any to start. To do this, the critical piece is to identify and meet needs. To create an environment where this can be done: Make eye

How to Move Your Goods to Greats

Our previous post, “Leaders, Focus on Moving Your Middle – Play Offense, Not Defense”, emphasized the importance of focusing on moving your middle majority to high performers. But how do you do that?  How do you get your good players, or your B players, to become A players? They all can’t be converted, but those who have usually have a leader that: 1. Sets high expectations.   This comes in the form of setting challenging goals and holding people accountable to them. 2. After high expectations are set, the leader then provides Assurance and Confidence.  This involves saying things like,  “I know we’ve

4 Ways to Seize the Moment

I had the chance to catch-up on some reading while on vacation recently.  I received The Power of Moments from a co-worker as a birthday present (she knows my love language is books), and it had been sitting on my office desk just itching to be read. The book highlights the importance of four characteristics that create moments: Elevation- Experiences that “rise above the routine.” Insight– Experiences that “rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world”. Pride–  Experiences that “capture us at our best” including times of achievement and/or courage.” Connection– Experiences that are social and that are heightened because they are

Leaders, Focus on Moving your Middle- Play Offense, Not Defense

Let’s pretend you have a performance appraisal system that rates people on a scale of 1-7.  One being the worst, seven being rock-star status.   You have ten direct reports and you have honestly and accurately rated them all (we’re assuming a perfect world here, bear with me). Here’s the breakdown of where people fall: You have three people in the 1-3 range. You have six people in the 4-6 range. And you have one lone rock star at 7. Which group should you focus most of your energy on in the coming year? If customer satisfaction research leads us to