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ARE YOU A LEADER?
Acquiring and fine-tuning leadership skills will enhance your career trajectory, whether you manage people or not. Check out the new blog from CÆDENCE Consulting. We’re sharing real-life stories highlighting advice, strategies, tactics, and tips for new and aspiring leaders. Facilitating your success is our only job.
Welcome! If you’re ready to take your career to the “next level”, you’ve come to the right place. Leaders are people applying leadership skills and behaviors to get results (regardless of their job role or title). Leaders inspire, leaders empower, leaders influence, leaders make good stuff happen! In this blog, we’ll be sharing stories to highlight the approaches, strategies, tactics, and tips learned over our decades of experience managing people, projects, and businesses. Our goal for each brief post is to provide an engaging story highlighting a practical nugget of wisdom that you can apply immediately to enhance your performance and your team’s results. We want you to become the kind of leader people want to work with and for, who people will go the extra mile for, and who’s teams consistently deliver beyond expectations. Our mission is to facilitate your success.
In some posts we will be referring to leaders in the formal sense (e.g., those people with the title of “manager” or “director”), but most of the time we’ll be talking about leaders in the more general sense (those applying leadership skills and behaviors to get results, regardless of their title). Even if the story in a particular week’s post revolves around a particular job title, the lesson learned will be applicable to leadership generally.
Throughout our posts, we’ll do our best to be consistent in the use of the following terminology:
Leader:
Anyone applying leadership skills and behaviors to get results, regardless of their formal title or role. Leaders may be managers, project managers, directors, or individual contributors. Leaders may or may not have others directly or indirectly reporting to them.
Manager:
Someone formally recognized as being in charge of a team who is responsible for developing the talent on the team and evaluating performance of team members. Managers typically have 4-18 direct reports.
Project Manager (PM):
Someone formally recognized as being in charge of one or more projects who is responsible for project execution and achieving project deliverables. PM’s generally do not have any direct reports.
Director:
Someone formally recognized as a department head, responsible for the overall functioning of one or more disciplines or services within an organization. Directors may have up to 100 people reporting to them indirectly, typically through a staff of 3-10 direct reporting managers.
Why are ideas cheap? Supply and demand – there are lots of ideas out there – everyone fancies themself an innovator, the supply far outstrips the demand. BUT, coming up with a good idea is only 1% of the success of a business. The hard part remains….
Why does execution matter more? Once an idea is created, there are hundreds of steps needed to turn it into a viable product backed by a viable business model. Driving rigor at speed through the product development, marketing and sales, pre-launch, and production ramp processes is what will make your business successful.
If you've got a favorite way of communicating (perhaps by text, email, or in-person) that you use most of the time, you are undermining the effectiveness of your communication! If you've ever been frustrated that your team or manager isn't taking action on what you've told them must be done – this post & infographic is for you.
Not all modes of communication are created equal. The way you communicate should be selected based on 3 situational factors: who you're communicating with, the gravity of your message, the outcome you're trying to achieve. Choosing the the mode appropriate to your purpose will greatly enhance the impact of your messaging. Choosing the wrong mode can undermine what you're trying to accomplish by communicating.
CAEDENCE has developed a novel improvement to overcome the communication-based shortfalls in existing methods. Applicable to all structured problem-solving approaches, Visual 8D™ enables teams to execute the familiar problem-solving steps (with no additional effort), while capturing plans and progress in easy-to-follow diagrams. Visual 8D™ puts teams in the position of providing answers to management and customer questions before being asked, resulting in improved control of the situation and minimizing time wasted on extraneous actions.
Danger is lurking around every corner in a new product development / new product introduction project. Avoidable risks wind up blindsiding teams, always at the worst possible moment. Risks blow up into problems because teams misjudge their nature and origin, and lack the right tools and processes to effectively identify, assess, and mitigate them. Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction
There are dozens of tools for reducing risk in new product development and introduction. We know because we've used them to successfully launch dozens of new products in highly demanding industries like automotive and aerospace. Let CAEDENCE show you a few of our favorite tools that you can use immediately to dramatically reduce the chances of disaster on your next NPD/NPI project.
Risk is inherent in new product development and introduction. Regardless of your personal risk tolerance, it's critical to understand that unmanaged risk could ruin your business. We're not saying "don't take risks". We're saying "take risks with your eyes open". Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction.
Many risks in NPD & NPI are visible. New process steps that must be implemented with caution and back-up plans. Unique product features that are challenging to accomplish. But there are other risks lurking. Things that can derail your project before you even realize. A bit nervous now? You should be! But, don't worry. Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction.
Successful new product development and introduction projects require carefully balancing dozens of critical parameters, any one of which could sink the ship. At the end of the day, each of those dozens of NPD/NPI success measures relates to an aspect of just 4 main stakeholder care-abouts: Launch timing, Project budget, Product margin performance, Quality / delivery (customer experience). Learn the systematic method to reduce risks in your new product developments.
CAEDENCE has decoded decades of business experience to reveal the intuition and practices of top performing teams and individuals to radically accelerate people and teams toward excellence. We know the theory, but we've also lived everything we teach and honed best practices for decades. This arms us with tons of real-world examples to engage students and clarify techniques. We often help clients out of crisis situations, but our passion is preventing crises from occurring in the first place. This means (a) establishing robust systems, (b) empowering leaders, and (c) upskilling teams.
We challenge our problem solving classes to play “20 questions” – can we guess a randomly selected word using just 20 yes/no questions? Engineers often say it’s impossible. But, 99 out of 100 times, we find the word! How? There’s no magic: what’s on display is the power of binary decision making, what we call “splitting the dictionary”. And you can apply it to all sorts of real-world problem-solving scenarios. “Splitting the dictionary” is a problem scoping technique of asking the right questions to eliminate as many incorrect possibilities as you can, thus focusing your root cause search in the right area. Effective scoping is key to efficient problem-solving. Once the problem is clearly defined, think of the root cause as a needle in a haystack. Before you start examining hay, first ask “Am I on the right farm?”, then, “Which haystack should I search?”, then “Which portion of the chosen haystack is most likely to contain the needle?” Scoping out the possibilities with a simple tool or test can radically acc
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