Not nearly as many folks as those who can identify problems in the world seem to be as skilled at going the next step in determining potential solutions. Is it just me, or is that a problem?  

As a leader and a coach and an executive consultant, I’m always happy to be asked for my opinion on things. Heck, I’m ecstatic when people let me drive a decision towards what I consider to be progress whenever I see a better way of doing things! I’m not always as happy or ecstatic though when those asking for my opinion – especially those I’m coaching – haven’t even bothered to assess a situation and consider at least a couple of alternative solutions to the problems they are experiencing.

Don’t get me wrong… Recognizing problems to in fact be problems is a critical first step in the problem-solving process. Problems don’t get resolved on their own though, nor will they get resolved simply by telling other people about them.

Whether they are big problems or small, real problems or merely perceived, being a part of the solution is an invaluable way of turning these challenges into tremendous opportunities. So stop blaming others for what’s happening around you, and stop relating to your problems as if they are brick walls you can’t get around, climb over, or even walk through. Problems exist to be solved, so start being a part of the solution.

Plus Delta Consulting specializes in improving performance and implementing positive changes in organizations to produce better business results.   With a continued focus on business transformation and performance improvement, we are now searching for two talented New York/New Jersey-based consultants to join our team as part of two different East Coast projects that are just getting started.

 Position Profiles:

• Part-time Senior Performance Improvement Project Manager– 15+ years of progressively challenging experience leading complex enterprise-wide change projects (IT systems implementation, business process improvement, organizational design and restructuring, etc.). Demonstrated experience conducting rapid-cycle organizational assessments, documenting current/future-state processes, identifying specific performance improvement opportunities, and presenting recommended roadmaps for change required.
  • Client profile: Online media/marketing services
  • Work location:  New Jersey
  • Project term: Start ASAP, with 60-80 total hours of support required initially and approximately 60-80 hours per month of continuing support expected for Phase 2 and beyond activities

• Full-time Supporting OCM Consultant– 7+ years of experience supporting enterprise-wide change initiatives (IT systems implementation, business process improvement, organizational design and restructuring, etc.). Demonstrated success managing training and development and change communications activities in particular within an ERP/SDLC setting.
  • Client profile: Financial Services
  • Work location:  New Jersey
  • Project term: Start June 4^th, with 12-18 month contract expected

These are both great long-term opportunities for seasoned consultants who bring not only exceptional functional expertise but also that “can do attitude” to get the job done! Consultants currently living in or willing to relocate to the New York/New Jersey area are preferred, but those who can travel to these areas on a weekly basis are also invited to apply. Just email us a copy of your complete resume, a cover letter highlighting your particular expertise in these areas, and your salary requirements to careers@plusdelta.net. These projects are starting soon, so don’t wait to respond!

If you want to achieve peak performance and produce breakthrough results in your organization, you must look much shorter-term. In addition to having a clear vision for the future, you must also have a clear sense of how you are actually going to implement your “micro goals” and very next steps for achieving that longer-term vision. 

If we consider goals to be those long-range strategic targets, then micro goals are the near-term actions required to get us from here to there. Micro goals are the baby steps required for us to be able to walk a whole mile. So many of the executives and team members I work with find it difficult to maintain focus on a long-range planning horizon, so micro goals serve to keep us on track when we get distracted by other priorities and opportunities along the journey from here to there.

If you are accustomed to convening strategic planning sessions with your teams once a year, and you are accustomed to only achieving 10 to 25 to maybe 50% of what you declare you will achieve, then it may be time for you to establish your 30-60-90 Day Implementation plan. Quarterly milestone targets are useful for keeping us directionally on track. I find that even these 90-day targets need to be broken down into 30 and 60-day micro goals though for us to truly be successful in achieving peak performance and producing breakthrough results. Any longer-term planning is insufficient for holding organizational attention. Any longer-term planning is likely to fall short of achieving what you intend to achieve!

Many of today’s employees are accustomed to employer-provided rich benefit packages with high employer contributions. They are also more benefit savvy as more vendor benefit communication is being directed at the individual versus the employer. In a time where the average employee has come to expect growing benefits packages and high employer contributions, how do organizations that can no longer afford to maintain this trend make changes without causing discontent among the employee population?

There is no lack of discussion surrounding what more HR executives must do to please both the executive team and the employee population. The Human Resources department realizes that it must get used to the trend of doing more with fewer resources, but how can it continue to do this efficiently and cost effectively? To whom can you turn for proper guidance and to help you accomplish these tasks?

For answers to these questions and more, please join Jeremy Lurey, CEO of Plus Delta Consulting, and Nadine Dwan, Employee Benefits Advisor/Broker at Beneflex Insurance Services, for this virtual presentation on “Implementing Cost Saving Benefit Strategies While Increasing Employees Perceived Value of Benefits” on May 9^th from 12-1pm ET. Don’t miss your chance to learn valuable strategies to drastically increase employee satisfaction and commitment in your organization!

Being a self-confident person, I regularly try to enroll other people in my ideas by assembling teams around me who are capable of implementing those very ideas. In this job market, it isn’t even that hard to find people who want to implement my ideas. That can be a recipe for disaster though if we simply hire people who seem eager to follow our paths. And then when they aren’t even capable of doing that, I for one have a hard time letting people go because I want to believe in their dedication and commitment to our shared vision (as I see it!) and because I don’t want to face the reality that they likely were bad hires in the first place. Note I didn’t say bad people. They likely just weren’t the best fit for what was truly required at that time and in that particular situation.

While I’d like to think that being passionate about our beliefs and tunnel-focused is the reason we often hire too fast and fire too slow, the speed with which we hire is probably far less of a problem than the speed with which we fire. The cost of hiring a new employee is supposedly 150% of that person’s starting annual salary. The cost for hiring the wrong person and then not firing him or her right away must be outrageous in comparison!

Over the last few years, I’ve learned all too well what the tremendous cost is for not parting paths and letting people go when they have proven not to be a perfect fit for what is truly needed. Countless hours invested in coaching them along with countless more hours creating work arounds and performing tasks myself – or even worse tasking others to do it – doesn’t solve the problem. It merely perpetuates it.

So take my advice. Slow down your hiring and determine exactly what critical success factors exist when you’re developing your position profiles. Then take your time to hire the right candidates for your open positions. Even if someone just quit and you feel the pressure to get some on board ASAP, don’t do it. Slow down the process, and you will reap the benefits of that decision soon enough.

And when those hiring decisions don’t work out as expected either, simply acknowledge it and move on. There are plenty of other fish in the sea, and the cost is too high for waiting on that one fish to flourish.

For years, I’ve heard of people fearing their 40th birthdays as if it meant they were now old or “over the hill”. For the past year or so, I’ve shrugged that off for the most part saying that I’ve always lived well beyond my years anyway. As the day drew closer, I then kept declaring how I was going to “figure out my life” and determine “what I’m going to do when I grow up” by the time I turned 40 – as if I would really have all the answers by then.  Now that the day has passed, I’m really glad it has because it feels like I now have permission to do exactly that!

I find it fascinating the stories I can create in my head about what I can and cannot do, and when I can and cannot do it. I suppose that’s not just my own non-fiction book though. Malcolm Gladwell writes about how it takes 10,000 hours before you can be really good at something.

As I look at the most important facets of my life – my relationships with my partners and my children, who I am as a consultant with my clients and CEO of my business, etc. – I’m realizing that I have definitely put in my 10,000 hours of sweat equity and perseverance to get to where I am today. Not only have I paid my dues though, I also have learned many valuable lessons. I choose not to relate to “mistakes” in my past performance, only “lessons learned” from doing something and not having it work out exactly as planned. Fortunately for me and those around me, I look in the mirror quite regularly to learn from those experiences and assess how I might do it differently in the future. Maybe that’s why turning 40 feels like a new beginning. Maybe that’s why I feel like I’m just hitting my stride…

Where are you telling yourself stories about your life?  What you can do and can’t do… Maybe more importantly, when are you going to start singing a different tune and declare, “Today I turn 40, and it’s time I start living my life!”

 As we look at the landscape of our clients, we see several trends emerging. Larger organizations focused on market demand and market opportunity are designing their strategies to give them better market share and increased growth post-recession. At the same time, many mid-sized companies are trying to build new business functions that they know are now needed to respond to emerging opportunities, but they often don’t know how to implement them on their own.  And smaller high-growth organizations are moving from their original founder/single-owner structure to the next level and need to instill new layers of management and infrastructure to make that next step.

No matter what their size or reason, leaders want to achieve greater success and provide enhanced value to their customers and key stakeholders. So when it comes to creating a new organization design, the development of the organization’s strategy must start with these very customers and stakeholders.

• Is your current organization structure aligned with your stated business strategy? Is it focused on meeting your customers’ current needs?
• Do you have any process steps that no longer add value to the organization given your emerging business strategy?
• Are there redundancies or gaps in your current processes and/or procedures that may provide opportunities for improvement?
• Does your organization have the ability to innovate? Can you quickly and effectively adapt to changing market conditions?

These questions are just a few of the ones you might want to ask yourself as you assess your current organization design. If you determine a gap exists between your current organization structure and stated business strategy, or perhaps you realize that your business has evolved beyond some of the early process steps that were implemented with a smaller, less complex business model, you’ll want to establish a “Design Team” to conduct a more complete assessment and develop a draft of the future-state design. Members of this Design Team likely will also be responsible for driving the implementation process, so be sure to include two or three members of the senior leadership team as well as one or two of the most important mid-level managers who are well-experienced in the business. This team also needs an Executive Champion to sponsor the effort and keep the team – and organization – on track.

During the design process, keep an open mind and encourage everyone to suggest any “out of the box” thinking that might produce better business results. Also, the focus must be on the organization of the future, rather than that of the past. Past successes – and failures for that matter – don’t necessarily predict future ones, so stay focused on any market trends you may have identified. Then you can align your work processes, business systems, and individual people and skills to where the organization is going rather than where it has already been!

Remember, no one organization design works for every organization. The goal here is simply to align the structure with the related work processes and organizational cultures such that they support each other and help the organization achieve its intended results. Organizations need to be built to change, not built to remain the same, so design an effective organization today that will enable you to meet your customers’ needs tomorrow – and beyond!

For years, the term “networking” meant to me that I had to go to big professional events and try to make new friends with a bunch of strangers. If I did that well, then I might be more successful in my independent consulting practice because my new BFF would help position me for new, exciting projects. Being more of an introvert myself, I never really enjoyed that kind of networking, so I never really took those steps to cultivate a strong network. At least that’s what I thought until recently because my network seems stronger than ever right now, and it clearly keeps me going whenever the going gets tough.

In just the last few months, I’ve been able to sell a variety of different projects in no small part because of my network. I’m a member of Vistage, the world’s largest Chief Executive association, and thanks to that network I’m now supporting a Washington DC-based global trade association with their succession planning efforts.

In addition, one of my good friends and colleagues needed to hire a new Vice President of Human Resources to manage the people practices at his organization, and he asked me to conduct the search given my deep experience and vast network in the field. I tapped our extensive team of talented HR executives about the role – many of whom forwarded the information to their colleagues… – and within days I had more qualified candidates to consider than I ever could have imagined.

Now, I have professional colleagues and former classmates from San Francisco and Seattle asking me about coaching senior leaders in their organizations. Oh, and that doesn’t even include the fellow consultant who referred me to her previous co-worker in New Jersey who needs to develop an enhanced sales training program – pronto!

There is so much in life that a Type A, achievement-oriented, driven person could achieve on his/her own.  Fortunately though, I’ve learned that I don’t have to do it all on my own. More importantly, I’ve learned that I can accomplish so much more when I leverage “my people”. Even just having my assistant Jessica faithfully by my side or knowing my folks will watch my kids for me if I need to travel out of town for work… It’s the network!

Yes, I live a pretty busy life. And yes, I live much of that life questioning how I can possibly get everything done that I want to get done. I’ve even spent many a day – many a year actually! – living the words of Lt. Col. Willie Sharp declaring, “No time!” in the movie Armageddon as the astronauts frantically try to blow up and get off of the asteroid (feel free to read one of my recent blog postsfor more on that). These days I’m continuing to recognize that there is an abundance of time in my life to get done what really needs to get done.

Kids. Work. Partners and significant others. Friends. Family. Volunteer commitments. Personal hobbies. How about just some good old fashioned “me time” simply to relax and recharge? These all factor into determining how we spend our time, and seeing the list in writing almost convinces me that there isn’t enough time to get it all done.

The cool thing though is that we don’t have to get it all done at one time.  In fact, it would be impossible to do so! Maybe more importantly, not all of these elements of life require as much of our attention at any given time. Kids require more attention when they are younger or perhaps outside of school hours. Volunteer commitments will always benefit from more of our time, however by the very nature of these commitments they only require what energy we can legitimately give to them.

As long as we keep everything in our life on our radar, we can safely shift priorities in any given moment, and in doing so manage all of our commitments at all times. With that as our foundation for living very full and balanced lives then, it truly is possible to get it all done. We just need to be intentional about how many balls we choose to juggle at any given time and be aware of which ones are at rest next to us as soon as we are ready for more.

So stop stressing out. Life’s too short to lose precious energy in that way. Start relating to the game of life as a game, and play all out. I’m confident you’ll not only have more fun but also get much more done!

A few years ago, I took a productivity management course called Mission Control (see MissionControl.com for more info). This program touted itself as the next generation in time management and provided a powerful framework for maintaining control in one’s life by committing thoughts and ideas and common To Do’s to more formal existence systems (e.g., calendars, note pads, etc.) such that they didn’t get lost without being fulfilled. While I still use many of the Mission Control techniques today, I’ve come to realize that without defining my priorities it really isn’t possible to be productive.   

Busy? Sure. Get a lot done? Absolutely. Truly productive though? I don’t think so!

Well, this story about never having enough time – or not being able to manage what time I do have effectively – doesn’t serve me. For starters, it comes from a place of scarcity and fear rather than a place of abundance and power. I’m confident I accomplish more than many in any given day, week, month, or year. I tend not to do so stress-free though when I worry about how I am going to get it all done.

The new game I’m playing these days is to pretend that I always have enough time to do what I deem most important. That just requires being more present in my life and recognizing that I am constantly choosing how to prioritize my time. No matter how busy I am, I actually do manage my time – just not always in line with my real priorities.

That’s where strategy comes into play. I may tactically execute with the best of them. If I don’t align my tactics to an overarching strategy though, then I’m much more likely to get wrapped up in being busy instead of being strategic. Being strategic requires being future-focused and always keeping your intended outcomes in mind. Without that, how productive can you really be?