In Good to Great, Jim Collins taught us that we need to get the right people in the right seats. In small business, the seats are fairly standard: President, General Manager, Sales Manager, Operations Manager, Finance Manger…There are industry-specific variations on this theme but those five titles represent the foundational core to most businesses with… Read more »
Business Management Blog
The After-Action Review
An After-Action Review (AAR), sometimes referred to as a project post-mortem, is a review of past performance to glean lessons that can be applied to future situations. Ideally, those learnings are then implemented within the organization as part of a continuous improvement effort. Ineffective AARs devolve into blame circles instead of being future oriented, focus… Read more »
The Fundamental Attribution Error
The Fundamental Attribution Error is a concept in psychology where one attributes others’ actions to their personality or character, while attributing the cause of one’s own actions to the circumstances they find themselves in. In other words, if I do something wrong, I couldn’t help it. If you do something wrong, you could’ve prevented it…. Read more »
Leadership in Trying Times
Funny enough, I must have missed the MBA class on how to navigate a global pandemic because I had the chickenpox (true story). But most of the small business leaders we work with didn’t do an MBA at all. They earned their success by getting their hands dirty, which is currently not recommended by the… Read more »
Managing Managers In A Crisis
When the crisis hits, it’s human nature for leadership to turn inward and start scrambling. How can we pivot? How can we make payroll? What’s going to happen to my business? My family? Will we even survive? The weight of not just being the support for your family but for all the families under your… Read more »
Today’s Leadership Communication
For two decades we’ve been training leaders how to communicate in a changing environment. While this global pandemic is unprecedented, we have seen crises that rhyme with it. The Dot Com bust, 9/11, the North East Blackout of 2003, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the financial crisis of 2008, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake… Read more »
Unprecedented Opportunity
One of the most challenging elements of change management is creating urgency. If people can’t understand “why now?” and “what’s in it for me”, change efforts can slow to a crawl. Take technological change, for example. Decades ago, companies moving to computerized accounting would run manual processes in parallel with their new software systems. Instead… Read more »
Your Career Crisis Isn’t About Your Job
Everyone hits a career crisis at some point in their working life. They start seeing what others are doing and the FOMO builds. Social media keeps them in touch with distant people who only report on the very best aspects of their lives. Some people breeze past career troubles and come out relatively unscathed. They… Read more »
What To Do When Your Boss Can’t Manage
Speaking engagements are such a fun opportunity to gather intelligence on what’s going on in the practice of management. While Bellrock focuses on small business, seminars allow us to access a much broader audience of professionals. A version of this question came up three times in three weeks at various seminars in Vancouver: “My boss… Read more »
Your Career Mindset: Finite or Infinite?
Simon Sinek (he’s the one who told you to identify why your business exists, not what it does) has introduced some new thinking into our business lexicon: Do you have a finite or infinite career mindset? Illustrating the concept at the leadership level, a leader with a finite mindset focuses on winning and competition while… Read more »