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Four Questions (and Tips) That Will Transform Your Culture

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People grow into the conversations you create around them. The best tool great leaders have to strengthen and empower others is powerful questions. Questions evoke curiosity. They force others to think. And, when answered well, allow others to take ownership of the process and responsibility for the outcomes.

Remarkable!It has been said that powerful questions can steer any conversation away from problems and personalities and move them toward meaningful solutions. Powerful questions evoke insight, stir creativity, inspire collaboration and help craft a culture of accountability.

So, to that end, let me offer four questions that, when asked often and answered well, can help you intentionally craft a Remarkable! culture.

1. Are you creating more value than you are taking?

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About the Author

Randy RossDr. Randy Ross is founder and CEO (Chief Enthusiasm Officer) of Remarkable! Randy is a “craftsman of culture and a catalytic coach,” who inspires elevated performance. A master of cultural transformation, Dr. Ross has a unique understanding of employee engagement and offers practical solutions for increasing both the morale and performance of teams. He is an author of the book, Remarkable!: Maximizing Results through Value Creation.

What they don’t teach in business school, but should…

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As Founding Partner of the executive search and leadership consulting firm Borderless, I was recently invited to the international meeting of the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs to offer a “real-world perspective” of how business school education is perceived and provide guidance to more than 100 educators from around the world – from the US and Switzerland to Qatar and China.

I had the opportunity to share insights based on our experience at Borderless working with a range of senior executives, as well as my ‘earlier life’ experience as a Dow executive. Moreover, I shared views on executive education from the survey conducted recently by my firm, which highlighted clear areas of strength and improvement for business schools and provided the core of our discussion.

These were my top 3 recommendations:

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About the Author

Andrew KrisAndrew Kris is a Founding Partner of Borderless. He pioneered the Borderless approach to executive search in 1997; a global business focus and a service-oriented approach that appeals to clients and candidates. Since then, he has found leaders for corporations in chemicals and life sciences, served as an advisor to clients in industry and continues to maintain an extensive personal network globally. As a commentator and author on shared services and business process outsourcing, he co-authored Shared Services – Shared Insights, Shared Services: mining for corporate gold and Shared Services and BPO: an executive briefing and several other volumes.

Professional Development – The StrategyDriven Professional is Always Employable

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Always employableEconomic downturns worry employees at all levels of the organization. Whether an executive, manager, or individual contributor, marketplace uncertainty brings employment risk. As businesses retrench to protect precious resources while maintaining quality and productivity, every organization member is asked to do more with less, to work harder and longer than before. Consequently, frustrations run high and job satisfaction low. Yet these same professionals cling to their positions out of the fear of the unknown because it appears to them that, in the depressed market, no one is hiring.

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Additional Information

Information on how to develop and maintain a complete LinkedIn profile, as well as its benefits, are further discussed in the following StrategyDriven articles:

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal, and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

5 Big Reasons Staff Training Should Involve E-Learning

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Every business leader and owner knows that training is critically important to the maintenance of a highly effective staff. What most managers don’t know is that staff training needs to incorporate a diverse types of training methods. Among these, e-learning is essential to both the staff and the company. Never heard of e-learning? Here are five reasons why you might want to keep your ear to the ground in the future.

1. 24/7

When you put materials online, they are accessible at any time of the day or night. A training course is rigid in the sense that you can only learn at specific points, chiefly when you are in the training course. But, with e-learning, an employee can decide to access the materials whenever they fancy. The result is that anyone within the business can better themselves in their own time and at their own pace. When they have the drive, they also have the tools at their disposal.

2. Cost Effective

The fact that the training course is online means the business doesn’t need to spend money on hosting the training session. That is not one-hundred percent true, however, as you will need to go to a training course to understand how to build e-learning programs. Oh, the irony! But, once you have a couple of Adobe Captivate training courses under your belt, there is no requirement to spend more. Businesses are always looking for ways to cut costs, and e-learning is probably one of the most effective cost cutting procedures.

5 Big Reasons Staff Training Should Involve E-Learning

3. A Greener Business

Does your company do its bit for the environment? It should because most authorities are less strict on businesses that are helping the planet. Plus, going ‘green’ saves you a lot of money too. E-learning makes your business greener because it is online. That means you use and waste less paper as there is no need for printouts or sheets. Also, e-learning cuts down on your carbon footprint. As everything is virtual, there is no need to commute to training sessions and burn fossil fuels in the process.

4. Improves Staff Retention

Staff can learn more from e-learning because of gamification. Gamification makes the process much more engaging as it adds competition with others, point scoring and rules. The staff has to use their brains more as a result as it is more challenging and interactive than sitting in a room listening to someone talk. When staff engagement and retention start to improve, your workforce will also get better at their jobs.

5. Further Reach

No matter where you or your staff is at any given moment, you are always able to participate in mobile learning if the information is online. So, instead of just affecting the people in the room, e-learning can affect the whole company. Everyone can get together and listen to the knowledge that will make them and the company better.

From your point of view, that is essential if you want to succeed and expand.

Professional Development Warning Flag 1 – Over-reliance on the I’ll Take Care of You Boss

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Broken manager promisesStrategyDriven Professionals continually seek to excel personally and professionally. As such, these top performers become the ‘go to’ person superiors rely on when difficult and/or critical tasks need to be completed; knowing they can rely on these individuals to get the job done right the first time. At times, however, these significant taskings diminish the professional’s ability to achieve his or her personal goals. Rather than revise the goals, managers taking the easy out nebulously promise to ‘take care’ of the professional during the performance review process. Reliance on such promises places the professional’s demonstrative achievement of personal goals and organizational value in peril and as well as his or her career advancement.

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