ARE YOU A LEADER?
Acquiring and fine-tuning leadership skills will enhance your career trajectory, whether you manage people or not. Check out the new blog from CÆDENCE Consulting. We’re sharing real-life stories highlighting advice, strategies, tactics, and tips for new and aspiring leaders. Facilitating your success is our only job.
Welcome! If you’re ready to take your career to the “next level”, you’ve come to the right place. Leaders are people applying leadership skills and behaviors to get results (regardless of their job role or title). Leaders inspire, leaders empower, leaders influence, leaders make good stuff happen! In this blog, we’ll be sharing stories to highlight the approaches, strategies, tactics, and tips learned over our decades of experience managing people, projects, and businesses. Our goal for each brief post is to provide an engaging story highlighting a practical nugget of wisdom that you can apply immediately to enhance your performance and your team’s results. We want you to become the kind of leader people want to work with and for, who people will go the extra mile for, and who’s teams consistently deliver beyond expectations. Our mission is to facilitate your success.
In some posts we will be referring to leaders in the formal sense (e.g., those people with the title of “manager” or “director”), but most of the time we’ll be talking about leaders in the more general sense (those applying leadership skills and behaviors to get results, regardless of their title). Even if the story in a particular week’s post revolves around a particular job title, the lesson learned will be applicable to leadership generally.
Throughout our posts, we’ll do our best to be consistent in the use of the following terminology:
Leader:
Anyone applying leadership skills and behaviors to get results, regardless of their formal title or role. Leaders may be managers, project managers, directors, or individual contributors. Leaders may or may not have others directly or indirectly reporting to them.
Manager:
Someone formally recognized as being in charge of a team who is responsible for developing the talent on the team and evaluating performance of team members. Managers typically have 4-18 direct reports.
Project Manager (PM):
Someone formally recognized as being in charge of one or more projects who is responsible for project execution and achieving project deliverables. PM’s generally do not have any direct reports.
Director:
Someone formally recognized as a department head, responsible for the overall functioning of one or more disciplines or services within an organization. Directors may have up to 100 people reporting to them indirectly, typically through a staff of 3-10 direct reporting managers.
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
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