Leadership Blog: Growth

It is that time of year when we’re closing out the year and looking forward to 2020. We set goals to advance our organizations, initiatives to achieve them and budgets to support them. How’s your strategic plan looking for 2020 – and beyond?

Hiring someone better than yourself is a good leadership strategy, and it naturally elevates the entire team. The recent hire of our new president, Doug Albregts, is a good example.

As we look to the New Year, we spend a lot of time talking strategy and what’s next. But it’s also important to reflect on where we’ve been and celebrate the wins.

A business can have strong talent and great products and services, but still not perform well. It may look good on the outside, but the data shows the business is not run well and profitability is below industry benchmarks. The business is missing its potential. I’ve seen it as w…

It’s natural to connect an organization’s difficulty in finding qualified workers to the tightness of the labor market. Attracting talent has always been a part of the business dialogue; however, it doesn’t seem to be as closely connected to unemployment rates or other labor indi…

Time flies when you’re … writing a blog. It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve committed to writing this bi-weekly blog on leadership, growth and culture for six years now. I remember writing the first blog on how I define leadership and not knowing how long I’d have topics to wr…

We like to think that as organizations we can execute on our primary plan (Plan A) and strategies and get the results we’re looking for. Sometimes it doesn’t happen that way.

Have you maxed out as a leader? It happens. As we get bigger, I see more people max out as leaders.

It’s planning season here at Marco for fiscal year 2017, which reminded me of what separates a good year from one that goes down in the record books. Most people would say a great year is exceeding their sales and profit goals. This is a really good indicator, but we do need to k…

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year ago already since we made our boldest move: Selling our company to Norwest Equity Partners (NEP), a leading investment firm headquartered in the Twin Cities. We knew the move meant we would need to grow – really grow. So what’s happened since…