Business Toolkit – Page 13 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

Define Your Supporting Goals

July 16, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Take a big goal for your department or your business unit and think about the support teams that contribute to hitting that goal.

It’s easy to focus on big departmental goals, but not everyone on the team can directly affect those numbers. Setting goals for supporting functions helps link people’s roles and the work they do every day to that broader departmental goal.

To do this, it requires you to break those big goals down into component parts. Assess which supporting activities make that big goal possible. With those activities identified, you can proceed to set goals for those supporting groups. That will help them drive departmental alignment around that bigger goal.

For example, I know one organization that was trying to reduce their costs by $100 million over a two-year period. Now, not everyone in the organization owned a budget, and they were asking, “How can I contribute to hitting that big number?” Everyone in the organization had to contribute something. They looked at those supporting functions and tried to understand what activities does that function do that drives that higher-level cost number?

The supply chain group understood that if they increased their inventory turns and improved their truck fill rate, it would make their operation more efficient, which would then allow the broader organization to take some costs out. The manufacturing team looked at their processes, and they understood that if they cut the line changeover time, it would make their process more efficient, again, contributing to reducing costs. The real estate team even chipped in. They looked at space utilization, and they deferred some new expenses to future years. Every group had a smart goal that linked their work to that higher-level $100 million cost reduction goal.

Something I encourage you to do is to take a big goal for your department or your business unit and think about the support teams that contribute to hitting that goal. Build out a process map and understand how the support teams’ work impacts that big number. Then be sure that their individual and team goals are tied to those drivers of hitting your larger goal.

When you pull everybody together and understand how they contribute, then make it clear to them how their goals drive that business unit goal, you’re going to get more alignment and excitement around the work they do and hopefully help you hit that goal more easily.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Fishing For Job Descriptions

July 14, 2025/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Training /by Trevor Jones

We often miss the mark when we write job descriptions. We’d be much better suited to understand the job vision before we list qualifications for a candidate.

Today’s post is by Bill Munn, author of Why Make Eagles Swim?

Dave is thirty-eight and manages a team of HR professionals. But he still remembers a peaceful day over thirty years ago when his father took him fishing for the first time.

For two weeks, Dave and his father had talked about the day they had planned. Dave’s dad described all the details of the sport – how to choose a lure, cast, tie a fisherman’s knot, and so on. Dave never tired of these descriptive details, which began to define fishing in his mind.

When the day of the outing finally arrived, they stayed on the lake from morning to dusk, covering all Dad’s favorite spots. Dave got to practice everything he had learned on shore.

But in the end, they caught nothing.

Dave was crestfallen. But later, he forgot his disappointment in the face of a big shock.

“How was it?” Dave’s mom asked when they walked in the back door.

“Fabulous,” his dad replied.

What? Dave thought. How can he think that when we caught nothing?

Later that evening, Dave shared his confusion with his father. The man smiled.

How much has AI impacted your workplace?

July 10, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: How much has AI impacted your workplace?

Tremendously – we’re facing major upheavals from AI’s presence 3.15%
Significantly – certain areas are being impacted in substantial ways 13.84%
Somewhat – a few specific areas are AI-impacted but most aren’t 30.82%
Not very – there are a small handful of areas slightly impacted by AI 27.04%
Not at all – AI has barely impacted us in any meaningful way 25.15%

Get ready for change. While only 17% of you report substantial AI impacts on your workplace, that’s a huge number in a short period of time. Right now, AI companies are ramping up their capabilities and expanding into new markets. As their functionality increases, it’ll be easier for them to make the business case for more changes in traditional organizations. Once those use cases and the corresponding economics overcome organizational inertia in the user companies, the tidal wave will break. At that point, those companies not integrating AI into their businesses will be at a competitive disadvantage – commercially, talent-wise, and economically. Start assessing your business now for areas that will be impacted and consider your priorities for bringing in new AI capabilities where they make sense. This doesn’t mean simply integrating AI for the sake of doing so. It means fully understanding the changes that are coming and taking action before you’re at a disadvantage.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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When hiring for a critical role, which best describes your approach?

July 3, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: When hiring for a critical role, which best describes your approach?

Hire a good fit now, versus waiting for a perfect fit that might come later 65.70%
Wait for a perfect fit, even if it means doing without in the near term 34.30%

Perfect is the Enemy of Filled. The vast majority (2/3) opt to hire someone who is a good fit sooner rather than waiting for a perfect fit later. Seems like a pragmatic approach. The one risk to manage is that they don’t have enough of the required skills to be fully successful in the role. Be sure to interview for this and surround that new hire with a support system that will help them learn the rest of their job and be successful in role. For those who prefer to wait for a perfect candidate, consider the opportunity cost. What work is not getting done while you’re waiting? Don’t only consider the work this person will be doing. Also consider the work of people (including you) who have to fulfill these responsibilities while the role is vacant. Consider what work those people aren’t doing while they’re performing tasks related to the open role. Once you consider this cost, you might reconsider your decision to wait for a perfect candidate.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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How to Set Goals That Go Beyond the Numbers

July 2, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

There are two major types of goals you can set for your business unit: quantitative and qualitative goals.

When you set goals, there are commonly two types: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative Goals

When you set goals that are quantitative, they’re going to focus on things like financial results, operational metrics, customer dynamics, or quality. You can typically track these types of goals pretty easily. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to be thoughtful about these metrics. A focused set of critical driver metrics is more valuable than a broad set of less relevant metrics that your team can’t affect.

Let me share an example. Let’s imagine you have a sales team. The overall goal for the division is to grow revenue. The driver metrics that affect revenue are price and volume. Now, we’re talking about the sales team here. They have no control over product price. If you just give this team a revenue goal for their business unit, it won’t focus their efforts appropriately. It could lead them to argue or complain about pricing policy. That’s just not productive. The business unit also doesn’t control customer service. Using total revenue for this team’s goal isn’t fair because they don’t control all of it.

When you go to set the sales team’s goal, focus their goals on what they can control. In this case, it’s new sales volume. Think about that sales team going out and trying to get more customers. The driver metrics, for their ability to acquire customers, are things like the number of prospects they talk to, the number of sales calls they conduct, and the conversion rate from a prospect to a paying customer. By focusing on these driver metrics for this sales team and focusing it on what they can control, you’re going to get better results.

When you think through your metrics for your business unit, think through the drivers. Consider the team’s ability to control those drivers. And make sure the goals you allocate to them are only focused on that which they can control. If you build your goals this way, you’re going to get a more concrete set of goals that your team feels empowered to actually drive.

Qualitative Goals

In addition to setting quantitative goals, which are pretty easy to set, a lot of times you’ll have to set qualitative goals. You can look at things like major project completion or milestones in completing that project. Sometimes, you want to measure things that are difficult to measure. You’ll have to infer from indirect quantitative metrics whether you’re making progress on that desired outcome. Things like culture are hard to measure, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to measure it. You can construct a set of indicators that let you know if you’re moving culture in the right direction. You can look at things that’ll tell you if you’re succeeding in reaching that higher-level end goal.

Let me offer a couple of examples. If we’re looking at culture, maybe we create a balance scorecard to measure our performance on cultural improvement. We want to be a top place to work. We want engaged associates. That’s hard to measure. But, we can look at quantitative metrics to tell us how we’re doing. We can look at associate retention, how many people stay in the organization. There are measures out there like a Gallup Q12 poll that can tell you which direction your culture is moving. You can look at things like absenteeism. I can measure if somebody’s not at work, and that’ll tell me if I have a good culture or a bad one. I can look at referral hires. Are people telling their friends, “Hey, you should come work here—it’s a great place to work?” Some organizations have kudos programs where associates reward one another for doing something great. How many people are using that program?

When I look at all of these quantitative metrics together, it gives me an indicator on whether my culture is strong or weak and if it’s going in the right direction. You may have situations where you’re doing a big project. And again, qualitative goals can matter here. Let’s look at implementing a large technology system. We may take an approach where we set goals based on milestones. We may set goals around use case completion, user acceptance testing, and training completion. Setting qualitative metrics is the same as setting quantitative ones. Understand the desired high-level outcome you’re trying to achieve. Think of drivers that point toward that outcome. For the ERP it’s things like “Are you hitting your milestones to get the project done?” For things like culture, maybe it’s several indicators that you tie together and say, “Does this picture tell me I’m going in the right direction?”

Qualitative goals can really help you understand how your organization is doing. Pay as much attention to them as you do to your quantitative goals.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How do you react when someone unexpectedly quits the team right before a big deliverable?

June 26, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: How do you react when someone unexpectedly quits the team right before a big deliverable?

I get extremely frustrated and feel betrayed or let down 8.59%
I get frustrated, but departures are a fact of life 39.92%
I get annoyed, but they have to do what’s right for them 38.19%
I’m happy they found a better opportunity 13.30%

Saying goodbye at an inopportune time. It’s the natural ebb and flow of people coming into your organization and departing it. Many of you (49%) report being frustrated when they leave right before a big deliverable. In fairness, that’s an appropriate reaction. Their departure has left the team in a pinch and unless there’s a strong bench to draw from, sufficient resources, or enough advance warning to put a transition plan in place, their departure has left you in a tight spot. Communicate expectations with team members related to departures – well in advance of them leaving. Let them know you’re happy to help them move onto new roles but that you expect the courtesy of enough advance notice to plan for their departure as well as the request that departures take place after the completion of major deliverables if possible. It might not prevent them leaving but they might stick around long enough to make sure they don’t leave you in a bad position.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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When someone on your team is over-eager about a project, how do you react?

June 19, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: When someone on your team is over-eager about a project, how do you react?

I get out of their way and let their enthusiasm drive 65.48%
I try to temper their enthusiasm a bit so they don’t upset others 29.76%
I pull them back and tell them to slow down 4.76%

Unbridled enthusiasm. Two thirds of you report you let someone on your team take a project and run with it if they’re eager to do so. While taking advantage of this enthusiasm can make the project move more quickly and have big impacts, if the person isn’t fully prepared or supported in their efforts, it may lead to a glorious failure. If you’re planning on letting them drive, be sure you’re checking in at appropriate intervals to make sure their enthusiasm isn’t causing issues with colleagues or introducing unnecessary risks into the project. That’s always the tradeoff you’re managing – speed versus risk versus quality of results. Once you’re confident in their ability to drive the project to completion with minimal issues, it’s appropriate to step out of their way. But until you have that confidence, be wary of just turning over the controls without monitoring their performance.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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5 SMART Goal-Setting Principles

June 18, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

When you’re setting your business unit or department goals, take the time to think through every goal to make sure they’re SMART.

When you go to set your business unit goals, there are a few principles you should follow. Any goals you set should be smart. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, these principles improve the team’s understanding of what they need to deliver. They’ll help you ensure you’re able to track performance against the achievement of the goal and gain the team’s commitment to achieving it. There are multiple versions of smart, but they all get to the same thing, creating clear and actionable goals that matter.

Specific

Specific gets to spelling out the behavior or outcome that you desire, it lets people know what to focus on and what actions are expected.

Measurable

As far as being measurable, if you can’t measure it, you don’t know if you succeeded. It also ensures you’re driving the right outcome. Like profits versus sales, because you’ll get very different behaviors depending on how you measure.

Achievable

The goal should be achievable. If it’s not realistic, people are going to give up and not even try. They’ll get halfway through the year and say, “We’re off course so you know what, forget it.”

Relevant

The goal needs to be relevant. It drives the activity that’s tied to a broader organizational goal. If I set a cost-cutting goal for the company but we’re trying to grow sales, that cost-cutting goal is going to be not relevant or helpful to achieving the broader goal of hitting sales.

Time-bound

Your goal should also be time-bound. People need a sense of urgency. Specifying time also enables better work and better project planning.

I worked in an organization where we were trying to increase the number of dollars that we were getting back from consumers who owed us money. The goal was specific. We said, “Here is the metric that matters. We need to achieve 100 million dollars of incremental dollars collected.” It was measurable. We knew exactly what data to get and how we would track it. The 100 million dollars was achievable. Sure it was a big number, but we looked at last year and we said we think we can hit 100 million this year. That goal was absolutely relevant. One of the bigger goals for the company was driving down our losses. It was really dependent upon bringing in these incremental dollars collected. And it was time-bound. We said, “By December 31st, we need to collect these incremental 100 million dollars.” By setting that smart goal, everyone in the organization knew exactly where we were going and why it mattered.

When you’re setting your business unit or department goals, take that time to think through every goal and make sure that those goals are smart.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How well do your team members pick up on the social cues around them?

June 12, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: How well do your team members pick up on the social cues around them?

Extremely well – they’re very attuned to their social surroundings 2.83%
Very well – they pick up on most cues but might miss subtle ones 27.12%
Well – they’re generally aware of the social environment most times 46.90%
Not well – they often miss social cues that should be obvious 20.33%
Not at all – they’re oblivious to the social context they’re in 2.82%

Clue them in. While 77% of you report your team members are generally attuned to social cues around them, 23% are challenged by it. Picking up on social cues in a business environment is a learned skill. Help your team members learn it – it’s a critical element of their advancement, effectiveness, and career success. After a meeting, explain the social cues they should have picked up on. When they miss cues, provide them actionable feedback by explaining what the cue was, how they could have recognized it, and how they should have reacted to it. The better clued in your team is to social cues around them, the less likely they are to commit a faux pas and instead can become more effective at influencing others.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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4 Common Pitfalls When Solving Problems

June 11, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Use these critical thinking tools to avoid four common pitfalls you can fall into when solving problems.

During your critical thinking processes, there are several pitfalls you might fall into, but you can avoid them:

Jumping to answers too quickly

The most common pitfall is jumping to answers too quickly. You think you know what the problem is and you rush off to solve it. Some of the tools you can use to avoid that pitfall are first, defining your problem well, having that clear problem statement. Why is your stakeholder asking you to solve this problem? And then you can ask and answer focusing questions, evaluate prior efforts, look at the problem through new lenses, and understand causality. By looking at all of those, it will prevent you from jumping ahead to answers before you’ve really understood what the problem is.

Not expanding the problem space

The second pitfall is being unwilling to expand the problem space. Why would I want to make the problem any worse than it is? Here’s the problem, I can solve this. But that might be a symptom. You need to think through what’s really causing that issue. So tools like blowing up the business and asking the five Whys can help you really define what the core issue is that you’re trying to solve. Sometimes you’re going to focus on things that don’t matter. You’ll come up with a recommendation, and even though it’s insightful, it won’t really change the performance of your organization. The technique there is using the 80/20 principle and asking yourself, “If I solve this, will it have a disproportionate impact on my organization? Or am I solving for that 80% that drives 20% of the results that don’t really matter?” The 80/20 rule will help you focus on results that do.

Taking analytics at face value

Another pitfall is taking the analytical results at face value and just accepting. Well, the answer from the analysis was seven. Well, what does seven mean? What are the implications of that? Techniques to use are getting to that high road, getting out of the analysis and asking yourself, “What does this mean?” And then looking for relationships between the answer from your analysis and other problems you’re trying to solve. Are there clusters? Are there similarities to problems you’ve faced in the past?

Not considering consequences

And the last pitfall you’re going to face in your critical thinking processes is not thinking through the future consequences of your answer. If you implement this, what’s going to happen? What are the knock-on effects of the recommendation? What will your competitors do? What will happen in the organization? What are the new problems you’re going to cause? This is where the seven So Whats can be a very powerful tool to help you understand and appreciate the consequences for the recommendation you’re making.

So, understand that these are the common pitfalls, but the critical thinking tools and techniques I’ve given you will help you avoid those pitfalls and come to better answers.

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Teach Others How to Think Critically

June 4, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

It’s great if you start using more critical thinking skills. It’s even better if you can get your team to use them.

Here are some simple practices that you can put into place to help your team think more critically:

Give them the tools

First, teach them these tools. Teach them the five whys, the seven so what’s, teach them about blowing up the business. Help them understand how to properly scope a problem. The more effectively you convey these tools to them, the more they’re going to use them on a daily basis.

Create opportunities for them

Second, create opportunities for them to practice these tools. Let them know if they’re going out to solve a problem that you expect them to apply these methods and come back to you with deliverables reflecting the use of these tools.

Coach your team

Third, you’ll need to coach your people on how they’re using these tools. Don’t get too focused on the analytical answers they come to you with. Yes, those are important, but also talk to them about how they got to those answers. Were they using the 80/20? Were they efficient in getting to those insights? Once they got those insights, did they come back up to the high road?

Hold them accountable

And fourth, hold them accountable to using these methods. If somebody comes to you with an analysis and they haven’t thought through the consequences of the recommendation, you need to send them away with the direction to go think through the consequences and come back to you when they’ve thought it through. It’s not always easy holding people accountable to using new tools and methods, but the more you do so, the more you’re going to find they’re thinking critically on their own.

I learned these skills the hard way. I had an engagement manager at one point who was really hard on me in terms of critical thinking skills. Every time I went off and did an analysis and I went to talk to Dave about it, he’d asked me,

Well, why did you do this analysis?

And how did you do the analysis?

Why did you run those numbers you ran?

Why are you making this recommendation?

How does this recommendation tie to your problem statement?

What are the consequences of this recommendation down the road?

And if I couldn’t answer those questions to his satisfaction, his direction was, “I want you to go think about this, come back this afternoon when you’ve thought about it some more, and then we’ll talk about it.” Those weren’t fun conversations for me, but in a very short period of time, and I’m talking about two months of working with Dave every single day, my critical thinking skills got so much better because he told me what I should be focusing on, not just generating the answer, but about how I was doing my work. His ability to teach me these tools, create opportunities for me to practice them, his coaching of me on these methods, and then holding me accountable to using them every single day helped me build my skills very rapidly.

So as you think about trying to get your teams to think more critically, figure out:

When are you going to teach them these tools?

What opportunities will you create in their daily work for them to apply these methods?

How are you going to remind yourself to coach them on the methods? Not just focus on the answer, but coach them on their application of critical thinking skills.

And how are you going to do the difficult thing of holding them accountable when they’re not applying these methods?

You, as the leader, have to focus on these things if you want to build your teams’ critical thinking capabilities. And if you do focus on it, you’ll find they’ll build their skills quite rapidly and you’re going to get to better answers much faster.

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How willing are you to give someone a second chance after they’ve betrayed your trust?

May 29, 2025/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Leadership, Poll /by Trevor Jones

Our reader poll today asks: How willing are you to give someone a second chance after they’ve betrayed your trust?

Very: We all make mistakes and deserve second chances 17.92%
Somewhat: I’m hesitant to expose myself like that again 41.62%
Not very: It takes a lot to get a second chance from me 32.08%
Not at all: Once you’ve betrayed me, it’s over 8.38%

Trust is Hard to Regain. 82% of you report you’re hesitant to extend trust again if it’s broken (if you’re willing to extend it again at all). To mitigate issues like this from occurring, make it clear to team members what your expectations are relative to the trust environment on your team. Let them know that it’s expected and will be given but if broken, it will be extremely difficult to repair. It’s then on you to live up to those standards and enforce them as well. Trust is precious and fragile. A team with a strong trust environment can do great things. Without that trust, it’s extremely challenging to be a successful team.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!