OpX Solutions Articles

Have you ever noticed that a person’s leadership skills are strongly connected with their personality traits? This means that different people have different natural leadership strengths. Many people believe that leaders are born. Others believe that leaders are made through growth opportunities, experience, and training. There is no doubt that some people naturally rise to […]

Mutual understanding depends on understanding oneself and understanding others. What motivates people to act as they do?  When you determine the answer to this question for specific individuals, you can adapt your communication style for more positive results. People are complicated. No simple rules exist for understanding what causes them to behave as they do, […]

The organizational climate has a direct impact on your people. In an atmosphere designed to reinforce productivity, tension and fear are at a minimum and people feel free to use their full potential for creativity and achievement. As a leader, you bear the primary responsibility for establishing the climate in your organization, department, or work […]

What do you think of when you hear the word “manufacturing”? When you hear the words “women in manufacturing”? When you hear the words “women in leadership in manufacturing”? If that makes you stop and think, good. I recently attended a conference in Southwest Virginia geared towards women in manufacturing, and there were well over […]

Also known as Rapid Improvement Teams or Kaizen Blitz, Kaizen Events are one of the activities that American companies love to organize when they need to tackle a specific problem. They are structured, and dedicated team projects to improve a specific performance or area. Although these events often lead to measurable results, such as improvement […]

Early in my career of helping organizations improve their operations, I learned that all organizations are either “green and growing, or ripe and rotting”.  There is no in between.  In today’s competitive environment, an organization must continuously strive to improve, or risk falling behind the competition. Almost every organization will take action to improve performance […]

Would you like to improve your effectiveness?  Do this quick exercise.  Write down five activities that would have a significant positive impact on your personal and professional goals if you spent more time on them.  Some examples might be developing your team, meeting with clients, or spending time with your kids. Now look at your […]

My very first working day in the United States started with a conference about Millennials: it was October 2018 and several local companies gathered in order to discuss how to retain and motivate this generation of people that is rejecting the status quo. Being a 27-year-old process improvement consultant, I quickly discovered that the conference […]

Increasing employee engagement is all the rage these days.  Ever since a 2013 study by Gallup that revealed only 30% of the workforce is “actively engaged”, organizations have been working to change their culture to improve engagement (see my FRONT article in July, 2015 issue on how to do this.)  But what about leadership engagement? […]