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The Greatest Gift: How Intentional Onboarding Shapes Culture—One Team Member at a Time
This holiday season, as stories of layoffs and leadership changes fill my feed, I keep coming back to a simple truth: The greatest gift we can give a new team member is to make them feel like they belong. Years ago, I started a new leadership role—full of ambition and hope. On that blazing summer…
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Culture is a Choice: How to Lead Your Team to Holiday Joy (No Matter What)
The end of the year is here—Thanksgiving has passed and now the final countdown is on. Whether you celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year’s, or simply revel in the crisp air and falling snow, it’s officially Holiday Season. Over the years, I’ve worked in a variety of places. Some created a fun, festive environment where…
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Preparation Changes Everything: How Planning Turns Vision into Reality
It was a gray, chilly December morning. I sat at my desk, surrounded by budget papers and meeting notes. My office was cold, but the anticipation in the air was unmistakable—tonight’s Council meeting would decide if months of planning would move our vision forward. Just months earlier, our team didn’t share this sense of certainty.…
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When Your Culture Flows, Results Follow: Lessons from Niagara Falls
It was a chilly fall day, the sky a steel gray, and a fine mist clung to everything—your hair, your jacket, even your breath. We left Buffalo, me and my wife, Sarah (the casual easy-going member of our family), heading north to see Niagara Falls from the Canadian side for the first time. As we…
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Discovering My Unique Position to Empower Leaders
Like making diamonds, time and pressure. That’s what I’ve gone through over the last several months as well. Finding light and building others, that’s what I do.
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Super Sunday
Today we prepare for Super Bowl 55 and once again, it features Tom Brady. Many outstanding teams have played in and won the super bowl. It’s a special game that many of the greatest athletes to play in the National Football League (NFL) have never played in and four teams have never made it too.…
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Remember and Learn
Sometimes something happens so suddenly that it catches everyone off guard. In 2020, we experienced this with the worldwide pandemic, COVID – 19. This radically changed the way we handle all day to day business, and it should also serve as a learning experience for how flexible we need to be. Last week I was…
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2021…No Excuses
Well, 2020 is in the rear-view mirror and your now sitting in 2021. Is everything better? COVID – 19 gone? Social issues and unemployment gone? The short answer is no. However, what needs to be gone is excuses for not getting things done, delaying, or not improving one’s self and team. It’s so freaking easy…
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The Holidays
This serves as a special time of year. A time when families and friends come together and celebrate with festive meals, beverages, sharing old memories while still creating new. Like many of you, we enjoy this season as well. These times have certainly been made more challenging given the COVID environment. This year as we…
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Leaders…It’s Time
The time is now, not next week, next month, or in 2021. We are in a crisis as a society and the people we lead feel this on the home front, in their work, and through social media. In all communication avenues I hear people saying “oh I can’t wait until 2020 is over” as…
