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In December, I will celebrate 14 years at North Group.  Vocationally speaking, these have been the greatest years of my career.  Our mission, values, and beliefs derive from eternal, immovable truths and provide positive purpose and accountability.  We get to work with, influence, and encourage smart, hard-working, purposeful, and courageous leaders every day.  It is exactly what I signed up for and even better than I expected.

Remembering how I felt in December 2009, my only “concern” about joining North Group was whether I would have the patience and focus to give purpose to the significant volume of meetings that I would likely lead.  Until that point, I observed that most of the meetings I sat in were boring and unproductive.

A simple web search reveals many convicting reasons why teams should meet regularly: alignment, trust building, decision making, problem solving, accountability, communication, learning, and idea collection to name a few.

The author, speaker, and leadership thinker, Patrick Lencioni articulates a leader’s role in meetings with two simple priorities:  team cohesion and organizational clarity.

Beyond these truths, I have learned over the past decade that two leadership mindsets drive successful meetings and organizational results:

  1.  I am here to serve my team and our organization.
  2.  My role is to move us toward clarity on every topic we discuss.

Absent these mindsets, meetings can feel like a waste of time.  With these two leadership mindsets, time together is likely to:

  • Produce stimulating conversation
  • Collect a broad perspective of leadership thoughts
  • Contribute to well-thought-out decisions
  • Clearly inform team members how they can be successful in a way that drives organization-wide success

Don’t give up meeting together.  Double down on purposeful meetings by preparing well both in mindset and priorities.  Let us know how we can help!

The path to the future for retiring business owners can seem overwhelming. In this video, Jerry Murray shares some of the common questions these leaders face, and how our team is prepared to support you throughout the transition.

BenCo Technology, headquartered in Honey Brook, PA, helps their customers “create better products by providing expert design, laser cutting and fabrication services.”

In our latest video, Jerry Murray shares how BenCo has grown to serve local, regional, and national clients since its inception in 1998.

As we come into the holiday season, our team has a tradition of embracing a spirit of gratitude and thankfulness.

We’d like to share our reflections and wish each of you a blessed Thanksgiving!

Sometimes you want to go…where everybody knows your name…and they’re always glad you came. And while you won’t find Sam Malone or any of the Cheers cast members at Master’s Advisors, you will certainly find a team that genuinely cares about each person that walks through their doors.

Master’s Advisors provides financial planning and wealth management services to their clients while prioritizing authenticity, empathy, conscientiousness, and optimism. Jerry Murray shares more about their story in our latest video.

As we come into the holiday season, our team has a tradition of embracing a spirit of gratitude and thankfulness. We’d like to share our reflections and wish each of you a blessed Thanksgiving!

 

Over the previous 17 years, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the National Football League (“NFL”), accumulated a record of 107 wins and 165 losses. On average, they lost 4 more games than they won every season. During that span, they played in only 2 playoff games. They lost both games. More recently, between 2011 and 2019, the team endured losing seasons in 8 out of 9 years. While team owners certainly invested significant resources to improve, the organization was stuck in mediocrity.

In 2020, the mediocrity ended when Tom Brady agreed to become the Buccaneers quarterback. Love him or hate him, Tom Brady has proven over and over to be one of (if not) THE greatest “field general” in the history of the NFL. While other quarterbacks rival and even surpass Brady’s physical skills, none match his ability to lead a team. Teammates and coaches laud his work ethic, his assuredness of success, his relational intentionality and his will never to give up. In 2020, leadership of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers improved. As a result, the organization improved, and they won their first championship in nearly two decades.

We believe organizations get better when leaders get better. We see it every day. In some ways, the notion is as simple as the natural law of motion that Isaac Newton introduced nearly 400 years ago…

  • An object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless it is acted upon by an external force (paraphrased).

Although Newton was a physicist and this first law of motion was intended for physical application, we believe it also applies to our behavior and the behavior of our organizations. Without an external force, our organizations will remain constant in habits and resulting performance levels. Leaders are the external force in organizations with the potential and responsibility to initiate, communicate and execute positive change. With that in mind, our organization’s best is only limited by our leaders’ best.

If you want to grow your organization, grow your leaders. The highest potential of your organization can be measured in direct correlation to the highest potential of your leaders. When your leaders get better, so will your organization!

When describing his NY Times bestselling book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell once said “The biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work. There’s an awful lot more that goes into it than we admit.”  Gladwell’s book was a bestseller for a reason.  Through interviews, research and a variety of observations, the author identified a range of factors that enable success across several venues.  Although the title suggests that the subjects of Gladwell’s research were unique in their pathways to success, I would counter (or perhaps clarify) that his greater conclusion was that we all have unique pathways toward success.

At North Group, we have worked alongside hundreds of clients over the past twenty-three years – and we agree.  It is true that behaviors such as hard work, developed expertise and teamwork are almost always present in successful organizations, yet the pathways that lead to a team’s current location are unique for each of us.

Researching and mapping current location on the pathway toward success is vital to understand what makes us successful.  For Gladwell, that understanding came through interviews, research, and observation.  At North Group, we use tools such as Organizational Health and Performance Assessments, Organizational 360 Assessments and Leadership 360 Assessments to understand the current location of leaders and their organizations. The truths revealed through our evaluations enable us to recommend and design unique strategies for personal and organizational development…pathways toward future success built on the unique, historical foundation of every individual and organization.

We believe in the innate potential for leaders and their organizations to become outliers – to achieve success via paths uniquely designed and available to them.  Our mission is to work alongside leaders and their organizations to achieve this potential…starting by understanding your current location on that path.

I wouldn’t consider myself a foodie, but I do have a few fairly strong eating preferences. I have grown to prefer bold flavors over comfort food, particularly at dinner time. Bring on foods enhanced by seasonings and sauces. In fact, I’m a huge sauce fan – a rich tomato, a sinus clearing horseradish cocktail sauce, and a smooth marsala are some of my favorites. I’d prefer no secrets in the sauces that I eat. Likewise, I’m not interested in how tomato sauce compares itself to another condiment. I am simply drawn to a bold, well-prepared sauce that is served at its best with me (and my fellow diners) in mind. Food experiences like this don’t happen all the time, but when a chef takes the time to make a statement sauce to accompany an entrée… I take notice and make a commitment to return.

Over the past several months, our blog covered several dimensions that together help organizations determine and direct their performance and productivity. We’ve used terms such as secret sauce and competitive advantage. Ultimately, our hope is that you use the conversation topics as a means to prepare your organization to deliver the boldest, most unforgettable service or product with your employees/co-workers, customers, and stakeholders in mind. Doing so requires effort for sure – but one of the surest ways to stay on track is to declare why you do what you do and to focus your team on answering that “why” with your everyday behaviors and deliverables.

Allow excellence and sincere care for customers to set you apart. Your sauce won’t be a secret for long and your organization will gain loyal customers that take notice and make a commitment to return.