Why Company Culture Matters!

A Beer Company Loving What They Do In The Service Of Others.

A Simple Game Plan to Cultural Shift!

Does your company need to make a cultural shift? The game plan is simple but the execution is challenging. Do you have what it takes?

Step 1: Identify your problems.

Be open minded and honest with yourself and identify all the major problems within your company. In order for you to shift your culture, you need to know what to fix. Are your problems any of the following: People, Hiring, Management, Supervisors, or worst case scenario YOU (Be Honest)!

Step 2: Reward change at the top.

Senior level buy-in is crucial for a long-term cultural shift. Likewise, employee buy-in is also essential to shift culture. Buy-in is hardest part of the process because the idea sounds great but execution is difficult. Even with the best reward programs, the decisions that need to be made are still difficult. What do I mean? Hear are a few what if scenarios: changing your managements or your personal habits, keeping the program at the focus while in the trenches, or termination of top performers due to no buy-in (my toughest, who wants to fire the best performer?).

Step 3: Pick a program.

There is no secret sauce that you can buy to fix your cultural problems. There are only programs and game plans that will help guide you to find your secret sauce which will shift your culture. The object from any training program is to give your team the tools it needs to implement your companies secret sauce (its culture). Which program should you buy? I recommend that you choose a program that senior level management is excited about and willing to put a 110% effort into it. Their involve will dramatically increase your success to shift the core culture.

The game plan is simple, but the execution is difficult. All great leaders need to go through great adversity to become a great leader. There is no other way to become a great leader.

By Resources Unlimited

7 Best Practices to Boost Employee Engagement!

We know that company culture drives Employee Engagement but what specifically can we do to change the company culture. Michael Stallard identified 7 Best Practices to Boost Employee Engagement they are as follows:

1. Set "Top Five" High Level Annual Priorities. Remain focused on the company goals so that the employees are not overwhelmed.
2. Know Their (Employee) Stories. Not their career stories, but their personal life. Build a friendship.
3. Help People Get Into the "Right Role." Know each persons DISC, Motivators, and Skills to coach them into the right role.
4. Develop the Habit of Emphasizing Positives. Remain positive and your team will rally behind you. There is no place for negativity here!
5. Provide Constructive Feedback in a Constructive Way. Coach your team with love and respect and they will follow you anywhere willingly.
6. Provide Autonomy in Execution. No job is to small or to big for you. Offer help but do not "micro mange" or "helicopter" them.
7. Hold In-Person Meetings and Regularly Check-In. Follow one of the best leaders in history British Prime Minister Winston Churchill by staying in touch with your team. Use whatever means of communication possible but stay in touch in their weekly or daily life. This only takes 5 minutes.

These 7 best practices are simple tasks that cost the company nothing but they will change your culture and drive Employee Engagement overnight. Employees want purpose, their voice heard, and a relationship with the people they spend more time with than their own family. Remember life is to short to be unhappy 40 to 60 hours a week.

By Resources Unlimited

Does Company Culture Affect Employee Engagement?

By Resources Unlimited

5 Tips For Hiring Your Next Boss!

Have you ever felt like your boss was using a hammer instead of a drill to drive a bolt into a piece of wood? This feeling is horrible. So the next time you look for a job consider Ron Carucci's, Five Pointers For Hiring Your Next Boss. The Five tips that Carucci gives are as follows:

1. Know yourself and what you want in a boss. You need to be very clear with want you want and expect from your leader and express that to them in your interview before you accept the job. Remember that there is nothing wrong with turning down a job.
2. Know how this opportunity advances who you want to become. Give them and yourself the opportunity to see if the "real" you fits with the company's culture because their culture and environment will shape your character, values and worldview. Life is to short to be miserable, so make sure this advancement moves you to be the person you want to become.
3. Rehearse the relationship. Ask them about specifics on the job so that they "talk shop" with you and start to reveal how the relationship will be when you come on board.
4. Ask real questions. "So what can I expect out of our relationship?" or "Can I talk to your team members to understand how your relationship is with them?" A true leader will respect you for asking proof of their leadership abilities.
5. Be an anthropologist. Observe and listen for any patterns or anything that intrigues you about the environment, interactions between people, or the teams' vibe. Show them you care about them, their company, and your future by asking questions about your observations of their team.

Life is hard enough without your career, here at Resources Unlimited, we understand that and we strive to make both the bosses and the employees life better by giving them tools to achieve better relationships and understanding of themselves.

By Resources Unlimited

3 Tips to Hiring Millennials the Right Way

There are several ways to hire millennials, but fitting them into your company's culture is whole another step. We help companies throughout the world hire the right people and on board them into the companies culture.

By Resources Unlimited

How to Speak to Millennials?

Many managers throughout thousands of companies have struggled with communicating with millennials. I recently read an article by Brianne Dehlinger entitled, Communicating with Millennials: How to Speak Their Language which gives the following tips to effectively communicate with millennials.

1. Be Authentic & Transparent
2. Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously
3. Don't Bury the Message
4. Entertain While You Inform
5. Use a Variety of Content Delivery Methods & Styles
6. Communicate Both Ways
7. Go Digital With Your Delivery Methods
8. Include Others In Your Conversations
9. Start the Conversation Now

So what are you waiting for, start engaging with the millennials within your workplace.

By Resources Unlimited

Warren Buffets 10 Rules for Success

How do you "Schedule for your Personality" if you do not know your personality style? Just a thought.

By Resources Unlimited

7 Tips to Managing Millennials in Manufacturing

Pat Dean is the Director of Recruiting at Advanced Technology Services and he gives 7 tips on how to manage Millennials in manufacturing. According to the his article, the 7 Best Ways To manage Millennials In Manufacturing are as follow:

1. Let Millennials collaborate
2. Let them work while on the go 
3. Offer training and development opportunities
4. Set clear career paths
5. Be open to integrating new technology
6. Create a mentoring program
7. Give Millennials a purpose

The most important thing to do as a manager of a Millennial is to get to know them. They are well studied and eager to learn when the manager or mentor takes an interest in them. Use Pat Dean's 7 tips to help you adapt your managing style to fit the Millennial's work style.

By Resources Unlimited

7 Essential Leadership Traits!

What essential leadership traits should every leader possess?

According to the 7 Essential Leadership Traits for 2016, by Don Trone, Mary Lou Wattman and Steve Branham, the traits are as follows:

1. Courage
2. Purpose
3. Passion
4. Alignment
5. Adaptability
6. Accountability
7. Resilience

As 2016 begins, leaders have already seen many changes within their organizations and industry and need to apply each one of these traits in order to deal with their challenges. Please share your challenges that you have faced and what traits or solutions you used to overcome those challenges. The best kind of learning are actual challenges and solutions that your peers faced, just like the articles uses the Apollo 13 CO2 scrubber challenge.

By Resources Unlimited

7 Workplace Communications Sins

Have you fallen victim to these 7 Deadliest Communication Sins by Skip Weisman?

1. Lack of specificity
2. Lack of respectful rebuttals
3. Lack of focus on desirable behaviors
4. Lack of immediacy
5. Lack of appropriate tone & body language
6. Lack of focused attention
7. Lack of directness & candor

By Resources Unlimited

5 Barriers that Kept Microsoft from Beating the iPhone!

Does your company's changes fail on a consistent basis?

Many companies fail at change because the company does not take into account the organizations culture. The organizations culture includes both the business side and the company's emotional side of the decision. According to Professor Quy Huy article, Five Reasons Most Companies Fail at Strategy Execution, Microsoft failed at beating the iPhone not because of lack of resources but because of its organizational culture.

Huy's identifies 5 barriers that most companies face when dealing with change. 

1. Mistrust and low sharing of useful and timely information

2. Low receptivity to effortful change

3. More talk than action, then misaligned action

4. Mechanistic action

5. Complacency

The key to success in any change within an organization is a good plan of action and an even better culture. To build a better culture, a company needs to figure out how to communicate with each other and DISC provides that common language between all employees. 

By Resources Unlimited

Happy New Years! Can You Identify the Friends DISC Style?

To start the New Year off right, Resources Unlimited has identified each of the DISC styles of the Friends cast while they pick their New Year resolutions. Our challenge to you, is can you identify the following DISC styles:

Chandler
Joey
Monica
Phoebe
Rachel
Ross

Good Luck!

By Resources Unlimited

Answers: Chandler: I, Joey: ID, Monica: CD, Phoebe: IS, Rachel: S, Ross: CI

Attitude Check!

As John C Maxwell said,

"People may HEAR your words, but they feel your ATTITUDE."

This quote rings so true in the DISC world. Many times people use DISC as their tool to assist them in communicating to others, especially those that have a different DISC style. However, sometimes the tool does not work as expected because their attitude is not in check with their words and approach. So the next time, you try to use DISC be sure to check your attitude before your approach.

By Resources Unlimited

Ripple Your Leadership with DISC

Has your company incorporated leadership skills from Chris Hutchinson book, Ripple: A field Manual for Leadership That Works?

If not, Kevin Kruse wrote a great article entitled, How to 'Ripple' Your Leadership summarizing Hutchinson's three step process to Ripple Your Leadership. 

1. Decide What Matters Most: Identify your values and lead with clarity and empathy around those values.

2. Chart Your Own Course: Establish a clear personal vision for your life with an end goal in mind. Begin working towards that goal everyday.

3. Know Where You're Awesome: Know your strengths and weaknesses to your benefit. If you do not know how to find your strengths and weaknesses, use a DISC profile that will identify them for you.

This is Hutchinson's three step process to Ripple Your Leadership. 

By Resources Unlimited

Using Personality Test to Hire and Employee Development

Over the Thanksgiving break, an article by Kristen Criswell, came across my desk entitled, Using personality Testing to Fill Positions and develop Employee Strenghts which addressed some of the uses of personality assessments within a tire shop. In this article, Criswell talks about the using DISC and Myers-Briggs assessments as part of the hiring process and for employee development. 

Resources Unlimited cautions companies on using Myers-Briggs and DISC assessments as part of the hiring process due to the recent Target case. That being said, certain DISC assessments may be used as part of the hiring process and Resources Unlimited would recommend using a DISC assessments that is researched, nondiscriminatory, validated, and has an adverse impact study proving these qualities. When a tire shop or any company uses these DISC assessments as part of the hiring process, they tend to have great success in retaining their new hires. Regarding Myers-Briggs assessments, Resources Unlimited would not recommend using this assessment as part of the hiring process as it is geared toward employee development.

Criswell also addresses assessments for employee development which both DISC and Myers-Briggs have exceled in historically. According to Criswell's article, "DISC profiles help increase your self-knowledge: how you respond to conflict, what motivates you, what causes you stress and how you solve problems; facilitate better teamwork and minimize team conflict; develop stronger sales skills by identifying and responding to customer styles; manage more effectively by understanding the dispositions and priorities of employees and team members: and become more self-knowledgeable, well-rounded and effective leaders.” On the other hand, Criswell states, “Myers-Briggs assumes that people naturally select personality preferences. The testing does not indicate real or potential effectiveness in career, school or personal life, but rather shows how any individual sees the world.” As you can see both DISC and Myers-Briggs assessments can be effective in employee development.

I hope this tire shop can help you understand the benefits of using personality test within the workplace as DISC assessments have helped Resources Unlimited improve its team work.

By Resources Unlimited

Happy Thanksgiving!

From the Resources Unlimited Team!

Can you identify the DISC personalities at Thanksgiving Dinner?

1. The individual who serves the food:

2. The individual who carves the turkey:

3. The individual who leads the blessing:

4. The individual who sets the table:

By: Resources Unlimited

Answers: 1-S, 2-D, 3-I, 4-C

Can Behaviors and Motivators Help Pick Stars?

According to the article, Are Companies Any Good at Picking Stars, many companies are having difficulty picking candidates or employees with "high potential." The people interviewed in this article reflected on their personal experiences regarding the search for high potential candidates to hire or employees to promote. Each interviewee struggled to find success from their past experiences in the process they used to find these individuals.

Can assessments help a company pick their next star successfully?

Resources Unlimited recommends changing the question to can assessments help a company fit the employee to the the right job? In Resources Unlimited's opinion, this is possible using the individuals personal Behaviors and Motivators. When using the Behaviors and Motivators assessments to place an individual in a job, the individual will naturally be motivated to do his or her job based on their personal driving forces. In addition, the individual's natural behaviors will be exploited by the job which will reduce his or her stress. Do you think that an employee whose behavioral strengths are required of them everyday and the job naturally motivates will be a high potential employee? 

We believe the answer is yes. If you agree, then your company needs to use assessments to help fit people to the right job rather than trying to define your employees "high potential." Every person has high potential when they are doing what they love to do!

By Resources Unlimited

Does Your Company Have A Simple Language To Understand Each Person's Personality?

Within Resources Unlimited, our common language is DISC. The DISC language has helped each person within our organization to better understand themselves and their co-workers personality. Understanding a person's personality, builds a culture with open communication lines and sincere enjoyment. In addition, the DISC language will reduce the companies people conflicts which every employer and manager's dream. So the question is, can you speak the DISC language?

By Resources Unlimited

Learn with QuikDiSC®

Do you want to have fun while learning or reinforcing the DiSC behaviors of communication? The QuikDiSC® Card Game is a great way to create fun and interesting conversations about DiSC. Use this before or during your training! This card game will allow each person to understand the DiSC styles even faster.

The QuikDiSC® Card Game consists of four sets of eight words describing each of the DiSC styles. There are different ways to use QuikDiSC® and we will include instructions for various games. 

Contact us to try QuikDiSC®!