Today’s business leaders must take a progressive, evolutionary approach to managing their companies and leading their people in order to compete in a modern business climate marked by increasing speed and constant change. To keep up with customer demand and incoming challenges from competitors, they need the right tools to implement processes that optimize employee engagement and productivity.

TM Solutions of Raleigh, North Carolina, a leading talent management firm delivering progressive solutions that help businesses grow and manage execution, has developed the Mobile Manager, a first-in-class talent management software solution powered by Virtual Performance Coaching, Talent Cards and Peer Cards.   The Mobile Manager provides a platform for success based on understanding the key drivers that motivate people and propel their performance to new heights of achievement on an ongoing basis.

Unlike milestone-driven performance management frameworks, Mobile Manager enables managers and teams to get the relevant information and individualized feedback they need, as they need it—daily and weekly—never letting untapped potential or festering workplace issues go unresolved between performance reviews. 

Recently, a middle-market North Carolina technology company approached TM Solutions to deliver over 150 personalized coaching feedback sessions spanning six focus areas to their leaders and key individual contributors.  The coaching feedback sessions covered personal effectiveness, leadership, communication, emotional intelligence, motivating others and conflict resolution.  TM Solutions custom-tailored each of the 150 sessions to the personal and unique needs of each individual, rather than delivering “off-the-shelf” or platform sessions more commonplace in talent management.

Through the modern miracle of Mobile Manager cloud technology, TM Solutions delivered all 150 sessions within 10 days, a feat that would take most Fortune 500 talent managers weeks or months to accomplish. Now, with the Mobile Manager, powered by Virtual Performance Coaching, talent management fuels efficiency, rather that hampering it.

Aided by on-site, live coaching and training workshops from Rob Pulley and the TM Solutions team, the North Carolina company is focusing on eight key drivers of its success.  First, the most important component of success is leadership, the executives and managers who Manage Profitability, Improve Performance, Engage Teams, and Develop for the Future. The profitability emphasis is on fast execution with individualized “take action” strategies for immediate implementation. Performance improvement focuses on high-impact dialogue to enhance individual and team productivity, quality, and efficiency.

Honing in on the fact that employee engagement suffers when leadership is not present or flexible, employees leave managers, not organizations.  Employee engagement is fueled by leaders who can strengthen relationships through building trust and understanding as well as adapting leadership styles and individualizing their motivation strategies.  Finally, the leadership framework seeks to develop a bench of strong players for the future, both in terms of leadership development and filling key roles as needs for the business arise in a fast-changing marketplace.

In addition to developing the leadership team, the North Carolina firm also focuses on the development of future leaders and employees as individual performers.  Areas of focus include Enhancing Personal Effectiveness, Strengthening Relationships, Expanding Influence, and Building Emotional Intelligence. 

First among individual performance drivers is enhancing personal effectiveness.  The goal here is to understand and leverage unique strengths and preferences for each individual to increase confidence and improve ability to work effectively in multiple environments and situations encountered in the workplace. Next, team members, as well as their leaders, work to strengthen their interpersonal relationships through reducing conflict and communication barriers through understanding their unique needs and interpersonal drivers.

Through Mobile Manager and Virtual Performance Coaching, employees work to expand their influence throughout the organization and, critically, their own flexibility, through improving their ability to read and adapt to various environmental and interpersonal situations.  Finally, the company is working with its people to build emotional intelligence.  As employees build their own emotional intelligence through understanding their own unique preferences and rejections, along with how others perceive them.

For more information on TM Solutions, Mobile Manager, and Virtual Performance Coaching, contact the company at info@tms-hr.com or call 919-325-1583.

About TM Solutions

TM Solutions, LLC, founded in 2004, is an HR consulting organization that specializes in providing best practice consultation and customized talent management solutions.  Combining TMS Online, HR Store, TMSelect, Mobile Manager and Leadership Workshops with TMS OnDemand consultation services, TM Solutions helps clients attract and retain top talent while minimizing risk and reducing cost.  Innovative companies in North Carolina’s Research Triangle region turn to TM Solutions for talent management needs.

Media Contact

Rob Pulley, President

Phone:   (919) 325-1583

Email:  robpulley@tms-hr.com

Hiring is such a simple concept, right?  You have an open position in your company, and you hire someone to fill it. They begin working for you, and you begin to compensate them for their services.   

Anyone who’s been involved in the hiring process knows that it isn’t that easy, ever.  So, what makes such a seemingly clear-cut transaction often so complicated?

Companies consist of people, and we’re all different, like snowflakes.  It’s the wonder of humanity. What makes human beings so special are the nuances, those shades of difference between the individuals that make up your company’s particular leadership, employees and potential talent.  Add all of these people up and tie them together with your company’s vision and supporting policies, and you have yourself an organizational culture uniquely different from any other. 

For the growing, successful business, this culture is the machine that drives the company through innovation to sustainable growth and profitability.  Unlike a machine, however, you can’t add or replace parts, like nuts or bolts, without changing the nature of the business itself—because you’re replacing people. When you add or replace people, you must choose wisely or risk ruining the “magic” that made your company successful in the first place.

As you go about replacing people, how do you keep the magic alive?  Hiring well has two primary components – position fit and organization fit.  Position fit refers simply to whether the person can do the job.  Does this individual have the knowledge, skill set and capacity to perform the work?  Organization fit refers to the style that underlines how things are done and whether the individual matches well with the company’s philosophy and culture and has the potential to mesh well with others on the team.

How do you identify position and organization fit in potential hires?  The first step in assessing any kind of fit is to specifically define your team’s needs.  Using the questions posed in the Four Cs of talent management—Capability, Consistency, Commitment, and Connection—you can identify the critical success factors necessary to hire well.

Position Fit—It’s About Capability and Consistency

Position fit maps to questions of Capability and Consistency. In terms of Capability, does your candidate have the knowledge, skill, ability, and experience to succeed in your open position? With regard to consistency, has your candidate demonstrated a track record of success in similar roles at other organizations, or roles with similar skill and ability requirements?

A thorough job description can assist in developing a laundry list of items that you anticipate a new person can help your business achieve. As you build this list, it’s important to prioritize, tapering the list to include only the three to six specific skills and abilities instrumental to success in the role at your company, including the baseline problem-solving capacity necessary for the work at hand.  

Using a variety of screening tools such as structured interviews, well-built applications and other assessments, can help you determine how each candidate stacks up on each of these critical areas. Hiring well becomes a much easier proposition when you have the right tools at your disposal to sort out all of the differences among your candidates.

Organization Fit—Measuring Commitment and Connection

Organization fit maps to questions of Commitment and Connection.  As you begin to measure a candidate’s commitment, you must ask if the candidate’s needs—their own wants, goals, and interests—are compatible with those of the organization. In terms of connection, you need to assess whether there’s potential for a true, human connection between the candidate and the team members with whom they will work.

Basically, you need to consider the culture of the business and the team into which you are looking to hire new talent, and this opens up a host of deeper questions as you drill down into the differences in the talent pool available to fill your open role. What sort of person will or won’t fit?  What sort of person might cover an existing gap in order to make the team stronger?  Does this person buy into the vision of the business?  Is this the next logical step in this candidate’s career path?  These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself when considering new talent.

Again, having the right tools at your disposal can make tackling organization fit a much simpler proposition, as you navigate the differences among various candidates, all of whom express an eagerness to join your firm.  Research-based assessment tools see past the veneer of an applicant-vetting process, identifying, measuring, and prioritizing the high-priority personal branding characteristics and strengths you need in a new hire with an “all-in” attitude that’s aligned with their teammates and the goals and aspirations of the organization.

If you’re having trouble defining these critical areas that make hiring great people a lot easier, TM Solutions can help. We can assist you with our Assessment and Selection services, helping you hire only the best by using research-based assessment tools such as TMSelect™ to identify and measure key knowledge, skills, abilities and other personal characteristics. 

Contact us today to learn more.

In last week’s post, “How to Motivate Others—Challenges and Opportunities,” we discussed multiple areas where people in leadership positions can betray the confidence of their employees and teams, leading to drops in engagement and performance.  Pitfalls for managers can include adopting one-size-fits-all motivational tactics, showing a lack of faith in employees, which leads to micro-management, believing in the concept of universal self-motivation, ongoing failure to provide timely coaching and feedback, and displaying open negativity.

While all of these letdowns can lead to under-performing individuals and team, there are multiple roads that pave the way to success. Let’s take a look at some of the good ways that managers achieve sustained excellence when motivating others.

Setting the Example

Great managers show leadership by looking inward first.  To influence and lead others, you must first set the example. Albert Schweitzer once said, “Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing.”  Providing a successful roadmap for others to follow, whether it’s through your work habits, attitude, or the level of engagement you display, can go a long way toward setting up your management tenure for success.

Leaders in business are role models.  When people follow you, they aren’t just following your orders; rather, they are imitating the behaviors that have made you successful.  Being a good role model is a huge responsibility that falls upon managers, and while we all have our weak moments, every manager should strive to minimize mistakes and liabilities and when they do happen, acknowledge them, learn from them, and continue to move forward.

Signaling Commitment

If setting the example takes introspection, managers must also make sure to show commitment outwardly to the people on their teams. The keys to signaling commitment to employees are being visible, involved, and “in the present.”

Too many managers hide when the workload becomes stressful or times are tough.  Just being visible to your employees and keeping a positive attitude goes a long way to securing their engagement. In addition to being visible, you must get involved—not too much, as with the micro-managers—but involved enough to where you can help your people make intelligent, informed decisions that will help them clear obstacles more quickly.  Finally, be in the present—all too often, managers get too entrenched in their own work and forget that their team must live through today’s successes and challenges.

Challenge Brings Out the Best

As humans we define our personal achievement not by how we routinely accomplish rudimentary tasks, but by how we overcome obstacles and meet challenges to accomplish tasks that we may not have thought possible.  Whether it’s running a faster mile or learning to bake a complex confection, we measure ourselves by overcoming the odds and redefining our own personal excellence.

So it is, too, with our work performance. People need challenging work to propel them to new heights. When you stay attentive to what people need, based on their personal interests and development goals, and then attune those goals to your business objectives, you’ll see that every time you hand out a new challenge, you’ll be handed back an even higher level of achievement.

Know Your People—Really Know Them

Do we really look at others for who they are, or do we just treat them as a group of numbers filling positions in the organization?  Because if we really want to motivate people, we need to know as much about them as we can.  We need to know their strengths, weaknesses and capacity for improvement—from a performance and development standpoint, there are no greater barometers for success.

While assessing strengths and weaknesses isn’t profound for many organizations, most companies fail to take that deeper dive that serves as the motivational engagement platform for these attributes, the employee’s values, interests, likes, dislikes and hot-buttons.  Sound talent management is about aligning the manager’s leadership and personal style, the goals of the business and team, and the interests of the individual. And it’s also about avoiding those issues that could be detrimental to the individual employee’s morale, causing a drop in performance and even disengagement.

Make Work Fun and Interesting

Managers must be creative to meet the engagement needs of their employees.  All people respond with higher levels of motivation when confronted with a manager committed to making their work more rewarding and to enriching their roles within the organization.

People need to know that they are always working toward a higher purpose, and that doesn’t necessarily always mean extra compensation.  People feel a very high sense of reward and fulfillment when they can sense their own importance to an organization constantly growing. And on the lighter side, it’s easy to see why people are better motivated when they associate work with fun, whether it’s the gamification of certain projects or goals, or just having a culture where people enjoy laughing with each other.

Conclusion

Motivating others is not something you can do successfully unless you commit to it as an ongoing process.  Your people will always have a wide range of needs, and those needs often cannot wait until the next scheduled interval for performance reviews or coaching sessions.

At TM Solutions, we spend a lot of time with our clients, helping them as they instill and fuel the processes and tools needed to build a culture where managers tailor motivational needs to the individuals that make up their teams.  To get an even deeper flavor for our thoughts on the subject of motivation, check out our blog series on the Eight Keys for Engaging Your Team through Effective Leadership, as well as our series on the Eight Leadership Essentials for Forging Trust through Action. 

We’d also like to invite you to be our guest, at no cost, for our upcoming webinar, Engaging Your Team through Effective Leadership, coming up on March 19 at 11 am Eastern time. Packed with real-world application and multiple learning opportunities, our leadership webinars give you the tools to develop a foundation for ongoing trust-building and motivation. Please follow this link for registration details.

Success in business requires proper planning and execution. We can’t effectively plan for our future success without properly diagnosing the present state of our organizations.

The TM Solutions Business Diagnostic Series addresses several key points to consider when assessing your business and how well it’s positioned for marketplace success.  We tackle fundamental concepts like Managing Profitability, Minimizing Risk, Maximizing Productivity, Improving Expertise and Capabilities, Strengthening Leadership Teams, and Investing in People. 

In our last installment, we outlined how Strengthening Leadership Teams drives organizational success. For our final article in the Business Diagnostics Series, we’ll take a comprehensive look at Investing in People, and how the investments that companies make in their human capital drive the other elements of their business and its ultimate, sustainable success.  Investing in People requires organizations to work diligently in four key areas:  Identifying and Developing Future Leaders, Developing Employees for Now and into the Future, Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement, and Building High-Performance Teams.

With each set of business checkup questions, we’ll show how Investing in People relates to the previous areas we’ve explored in the series, providing a frame of reference for how people drive success in every aspect of a business.

Identifying and Developing Future Leaders

Investing in people requires an ongoing dedication to identifying and developing future leaders. Leaders provide the direction and strategy that, when coupled with engaged contributors in operations, sales, marketing, and other departments within the organization, ultimately drive the sustainable success of the company.

In order to properly identify and develop future leaders, companies must have a keen understanding of the success factors that are most important for those in leadership positions within the organization’s own unique culture and framework.  Once you understand the profile of successful leaders in your company, you can then set about replicating this profile and developing a bench of future leaders.

This development requires a lot of time and resources.  Companies must invest wisely in the right tools and processes that facilitate better talent acquisition, retention, and development.  Managers must continuously develop themselves through these tools in order to motivate, engage, and coach the contributors who will one day become managers and executives themselves.

Business Checkup Questions

1. Do we fully understand what success factors are most important for key leadership positions?   (Strengthening Leadership Teams)
2. Do we have a pipeline of leaders and the appropriate bench strength for key positions? (Strengthening Leadership Teams)
3. Do we invest time and resources to develop leaders and employees? (Strengthening Leadership Teams)
4. Do our managers have the appropriate tools and resources available to hire, engage, coach and remove employees effectively? (Improving Expertise and Capabilities)

Developing Employees for Now and into the Future

While the process of Investing in People begins with an analysis of the success factors of the company’s current leadership, it quickly moves into the development of key contributors and ultimately to all employees throughout the organization.  Companies must stay attuned to the success factors that drive performance excellence for individual contributors. Executives and managers must clearly communicate to their teams exactly what’s required of them to contribute to the success of the organization, positioning themselves for future leadership in the process.

Companies must take a hard look at organizational fit, drilling down to each contributing position—are the right people in the right roles in which they can and will succeed?  An analysis of positional fit requires a level of accountability, measuring the production and efficiency of each individual across the organization and their ability to consistently deliver results that are both on-time and within budgeted resources. 

The concept of having the right people in the right roles is a two-way street.  Not only should decision-makers recognize the organization’s needs, but those of the individuals as well.  They should understand each employee’s needs and wants, as well as their strengths and liabilities, straight from the onboarding process.  An early understanding of the drivers from each employee’s perspective leads to better utilization of each contributor.  This approach results in higher engagement, better performance, and achievement of the company’s business goals and the individual’s career goals.

Business Checkup Questions

1. Do our employees have a clear understanding of what they will need to do to contribute to the future success of the organization? (Strengthening Leadership Teams
2. Do we have the right talent in the right roles?  Can we adequately execute our operational and strategic plans? (Managing Profitability)
3. Are employees reaching full or acceptable productivity levels in a timely fashion? (Improving Expertise and Capabilities)
4. Are we aware of each team member’s wants and needs, natural strengths or potential liabilities?  Are we aware of this during the onboarding process or does it take six to 12 months to determine? (Maximizing Productivity)

 Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Today’s successful organizations are marked by a culture of continuous improvement.  While some companies define this concept purely in terms of their offerings to their customers, top tier organizations apply continuous improvement to every aspect of the business, especially in the leveraging of human capital.

Cultures of continuous improvement allow for flexible decision-making.  Managers and executives display a business agility facilitated by the right tools that they can use to be both proactive and quick in seizing on marketplace opportunities.  Continuous improvement means that managers provide on-demand performance feedback and coaching to each employee as needed, improving production, quality, and productivity along the way, not simply at scheduled junctures like performance reviews.

Companies must dedicate resources that are available for those with initiative, so that each contributor can define take-action strategies for immediate improvement.  Organizations should gear these offerings, whether they are coaching sessions, leadership seminars, or personal development courses, to the individual needs of each employee. 

Management must be proactive in providing ongoing opportunities that meet the evolving needs of each employee for increased responsibility and more challenging work.  Challenging your employees leads to higher engagement, fueling personal and professional growth over the long haul of their tenure with the company, as well as higher productivity in the near term.

Business Checkup Questions

1. Can the manager provide on-demand performance feedback and coaching to employee to improve production, quality and productivity?  (Managing Profitability)
2. Do our managers and employees proactively take advantage of growth opportunities or do they do so because it’s required? (Improving Expertise and Capabilities)
3. Can our performance management process or system provide individualized take action strategies ready to implement right away? Or is this only provided once or twice a year? (Maximizing Productivity)
4. Do we provide ongoing opportunities for personal growth and increased responsibilities through training, coaching and challenging assignments?  Is this based on individual interests? (Maximizing Productivity)

 Building High-Performance Teams

The most successful companies understand the concept that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. High-Performance Teams are cohesive groups of individuals working collectively, with efficiency and high effectiveness, toward mutual goals, not a group of individuals focused on personal accomplishments.  The best organizations build and maintain high-performance teams that collaborate to meet business goals and achieve sustainable profitability. Organizations must first look to their results to see if they can define teams as high-performing. Results analysis can’t simply be a myopic look at profits—a deep dive is required here, to ensure that the underlying elements of sustainable profitability are in place, such as productivity, quality, and attention to both revenue generation and expense management.

Managers drive high-performance teams through the ability to make quick decisions and generate creative solutions to the challenges that face their teams on a weekly, sometimes daily basis.  And managers can’t simply carry the load themselves—they must effectively manage the performance of each contributor and face accountability for doing so.

Finally, high-performance teams require engagement from managers and each individual on the team.  There is a real trap here for corporate executives, as they can’t simply assume that managers have the level of engagement necessary to inspire others.  Leading teams requires that managers set the ultimate example in having a positive attitude in their day-to-day activities, as well as an optimistic outlook for the team’s performance in contributing to the overall success of the company. Positivity and optimism are contagious, and exhibiting these values sets the bar high for each contributor in the group.

Business Checkup Questions

1. Are we consistently achieving organizational production, quality and productivity goals? (Strengthening Leadership Teams)
2. Can our managers and teams effectively respond to urgent situations calling for quick action and creative solutions? (Strengthening Leadership Teams)
3. Can managers effectively manage performance?  Are they held accountable? (Managing Profitability)
4. Are managers and employees fully engaged in the business?  (Managing Profitability)

For more information on business diagnostics and how you can effectively plan for the future of your business, visit the TM Solutions website at www.tms-hr.com.

Success in business requires proper planning and execution. We can’t effectively plan for our future success without properly diagnosing the present state of our organizations.

The TM Solutions Business Diagnostic Series addresses several key points to consider when assessing your business and how well it’s positioned for marketplace success.  We tackle fundamental concepts like Managing Profitability, Minimizing Risk, Maximizing Productivity, Improving Expertise and Capabilities, Strengthening Leadership Teams, and Investing in People. 

In last week’s diagnostic piece, we discussed several ways for Improving Expertise and Capabilities. Today’s discussion addresses how companies execute strategies for Strengthening Leadership Teams.  We take these principles from our own talent development process for powering corporate leadership, whereby organizations follow these four tactics:  aligning culture and leaders with business strategy, improving ability to respond to changing needs, improving ability to influence and motivate others, and building leaders for sustained excellence and innovation.  A good way for leaders, whether they are seasoned veterans or just emerging in a newly-earned role, to remember these tactics is to embed the terms Align, Assess, Engage, and Develop into their leadership vocabulary. 

Aligning culture and leaders with business strategy (Align)

Strengthening leadership teams begins with an honest analysis of success factors in leadership positions and contributor roles within the organization, as well as the company’s strategic plan for accomplishing its vision.  Organizations must begin the process of leadership development by identifying key success factors unique to company and the competitive marketplace that drive productivity and engagement.

As companies understand the components that make up the profile of a successful leader or contributor within the organization, they must then address the corporate culture.  The culture must align properly with these factors in order to produce a breeding ground for successful leaders and contributors.  A culture that facilitates success among leaders will drive the company to new heights of achievement in the near future while developing key contributors for leadership roles in the longer term.

Key to cultural alignment is to ensure that the leadership team’s values and objectives are consistent with and contribute to the organization’s business objectives and strategy. The ultimate goal here is to eliminate organizational silos, where group specialization or agendas take precedence over the common goals or mission of the organization.

Business Checkup Questions

1.    Do we fully understand what success factors are most important for leadership and key individual contributor positions? 

2.    Do we have the necessary leadership team to effectively execute our operational and strategic plans?

3.    Is our vision and strategy for the business clearly understood by our leadership team?

4.    Do our leadership team’s values and objectives align with business culture and strategy?  Do we have silos within the organization?

Improving ability to respond to changing needs (Assess, Engage)

Next, companies must determine if the corporate culture defines accountability for everyone, whether they sit in the executive suite, lead front-line teams, or fill key contributor positions. An assessment of revenue, expenses, profitability, and, the team’s ability to consistently hit quality and productivity goals will determine the current level of accountability within the organization.

Leaders must be productive and efficient in planning, execution, and follow-up to achieve a culture of accountability. Effective planning can mean accomplishing more with fewer resources, resulting in greater profitability and sustainability for the business. As engaged teams and individual contributors perform within a culture that clearly defines success and accountability, they can be more nimble, responding to both internal and customer needs with greater speed and creativity.

Business Checkup Questions

1.    Do we have a culture of accountability?  Are we consistently achieving organizational production, quality and productivity goals? 

2.    Are our leaders productive and efficient at planning, execution and follow-up?

3.    Can our leaders consistently get more accomplished with fewer resources? 

4.    Can our leaders effectively respond to urgent situations calling for quick action and creative solutions?

Improving ability to influence and motivate others (Engage, Develop)

As leaders develop the foundational abilities to assess their teams, align them with the company’s business goals, and create a culture that’s a playing field for high performance, they must also continuously improve their ability to influence and motivate others.  Great leaders don’t employ one-size-fits-all motivational gimmicks; they work to understand the priorities of their peers and direct reports.

Building this understanding is hard work, and filled with both opportunity and challenge.  While leaders must understand what’s important to the people around them, they must also engage their people on multiple levels to ensure that everyone in the organization has a clear understanding of their individual responsibilities for driving the success of their team and the company as a whole.

This process doesn’t stop with a periodic review or coaching session—the process is ongoing, and never-ending. Leaders must keep communication lines open, informing everyone—executives, managers, and contributors, of progress toward reaching business goals, as well as any potential problems or issues that stand as obstacles. Great leaders deal promptly with any performance issues that arise, in order to facilitate the growth and learning that is often required for employees to break through personal barriers to achieve better results.

Business Checkup Questions

1.    Do our leaders understand what’s important to their peers and direct reports?

2.    Do our leaders help employees develop a clear understanding of what they will need to do to contribute to the success of the team and organization?

3.    Do our leaders keep others informed of progress, issues, and potential problems, both up and down the organization?

4.    Do our leaders deal effectively and timely with performance issues, seeing them as opportunities for growth and learning?

Building leaders for sustained excellence and innovation (Develop)

The final element for Strengthening Leadership teams is building leaders for sustained excellence and innovation, since businesses must focus not only on today’s goals but also ready themselves for the future. From a cultural standpoint, leaders must speak about the company and its future prospects with an infectious optimism that translates vision into action.

Leadership development shouldn’t be exclusive to current executives and managers. To ensure a strong bench of future leaders to take the reins when called upon, companies must invest time and resources across the organization. As they develop individuals within the organization, executives should be able to map the future with ease, seeing clearly the people who will assume greater responsibility down the road.

Having a strong culture defined by achievement and accountability should create an environment where leaders at every level can and do take advantage of growth opportunities by their own initiative. The hallmark of successful organizations is a leadership team committed to developing its talents, fueling the creativity needed to drive future innovations, both in how the company performs internally, as well as in the marketplace.

Business Checkup Questions

1.    Do our leaders optimistically talk about the future and possibilities for the organization and their teams, and can they translate vision to action?

2.    Do we have a pipeline of leaders and the appropriate bench strength for all key positions?

3.    Do we invest time and resources to develop leaders and employees?

4.    Do we have a culture of continuous improvement?  Do our leaders proactively take advantage of learning and growth opportunities or do they need to be pushed and pulled to do so?

Next week, be sure to check out the final installment of the TM Solutions Business Diagnostics Series, Investing in People.  When companies make a conscious, ongoing effort to raise their human capital, they see multiple areas of improvement across the organization.