Jim has spent over two decades helping thousands of managers in hundreds of organizations build high service/quality teams and cultures. As co-founder of The Achieve Group, Jim Clemmer worked with California-based Zenger Miller and Tom Peters to help executive teams implement a cultural change process called Toward Excellence. A key element of this process was entitled "Existing For the Customer".
Change, growth, and leadership have been constant themes in Jim's work since he wrote his first bestseller The VIP Strategy: Leadership Skills for Exceptional Performance. These messages were a key focus of his third book, Pathways to Performance: A Guide to Transforming Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization. In Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success Jim helped his audiences deal with personal growth, change and leadership. His new companion book The Leader's Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success helps anyone leading others to nurture growth and effectively deal with constant change.
Leadership @ the Speed of Change
This large topic area is the broadest application of Jim's five bestselling books and 25 years of experience training, consulting with, speaking to, and facilitating hundreds of management teams. Most of the management teams Jim works with have programs and processes in place for strategic planning, training, Six Sigma, operational reviews, organization development, customer service, process management, IT programs, special initiative project teams, performance management, restructuring, and the like. Their common problems are leading the changes that are needed to coordinate and effectively implement all these piecemeal efforts.
Developing a Customer-Centered Organization
Research clearly shows that high performing organizations are highly customer-centered. Yet research also shows that customer satisfaction levels have been steadily declining. Most attempts to improve customer service are too narrow and superficial. They fail to focus the organization's culture and core processes on serving customers. That's why 50-70% of these programs consistently fail. Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter likens the typical organization improvement effort to "putting lipstick on a bulldog...not only has the bulldog's appearance not been improved, but now it's really angry."
Building a High Performance Culture
Two decades of research shows that an organization's culture is the key factor in its performance. The accelerating pace of change, new technologies, customer demands, e-commerce, workforce demographics, business model challenges, fierce competition, shareholder expectations, shrinking cycle times, shifting work ethics, and the like, are pulling organizations in many directions. Now, more than ever, organizations need the bonding glue of a strong culture to hold everything and everyone together.
High performing organizations bring together the intangible leadership issues that define their unique character and rally people around a deeper sense of purpose. These powerful feelings are made tangible through the strong implementation of management processes and systems that translate ideals into action.
Timeless Leadership Principles
Leadership is widely recognized as a key factor in personal, team, and organization success. As a result, a huge "leadership industry" has developed featuring a multitude of theories and models, as well as a confusing array of grids, charts, formulas, and buzzwords. Drawing on decades of research, extensive experience coaching and developing thousands of managers, and previous bestselling books, Jim distills today's leadership information overload to its core essentials.
Harnessing the Power of Teams
Highly effective leaders are now showing the performance power of strong teams. Where teams have been effectively organized and led, there have been dramatic improvements in productivity, customer service, quality, process management, innovation, cost effectiveness, job satisfaction, morale and financial performance.
However, research over the last two decades has continually shown that 60-70% of those "change management" efforts are failing. A key contributor to the problem is that so many so-called "teams" aren't. They're too often poorly focused, weakly led groups, committees, task forces, or councils.
Keynote Presentations
Jim starts by thoroughly understanding the audience to be addressed, and the key themes of the meeting, as well as the larger aims of that organization's leaders. He then draws from his huge repertoire of research, examples, illustrations, humor, stories, how to points, leadership models, and implementation frameworks to craft a dynamic and energizing keynote presentation tailored to hit the audience's change leadership hot buttons.
Management Team Retreats
Jim has conducted intensive two-day offsite retreats with over 200 management teams during the last two decades. He is uniquely qualified and equipped to lead highly customized management team retreats that are designed to meet the distinctive needs of each management team. He can draw from a vast toolkit of experience, learning methods, observations, examples, planning processes, research, and team/organization development approaches to help each team meet its objectives.
Management Workshops
These sessions are generally for a mixed audience of supervisors, managers, and executives. The focus is usually on individual learning and personal development. In some cases, small groups or teams may share a roundtable or small group for collective assessments, learning, and application planning. Given the wider diversity of workshop audiences and their range of individual learning objectives, the agenda is more structured. Jim will flex or weight particular parts of the workshop as the majority of learning needs become apparent.