One on One’s… No, this isn’t a Basketball Game!
Staying connected with your team, especially your direct reports, is essential to creating a productive and supportive work environment. However, with the number of tasks to complete each day, it seems this is getting harder and harder to do. To put more focus on staying connected, a few GPS clients have introduced a concept called “one on one’s” with each of their direct reports. So, what do these look like?
Dreaming a Vision into a High Performing Team
Through good fortune paired with some wise choices, I’ve had the opportunity to be part of three high performing teams in my dairy career, and most recently was a co-founder with two partners building from scratch GPS Dairy Consulting which has become a highly respected team of consultants. It’s been said that it first takes a far-reaching dream to develop a compelling vision, and in turn a vision with purpose to attract and build a high performing team. So, just how did a “good” team become the high performing team that built the GPS Dairy Consulting business? Here are a few things I’ve learned on the journey:
Align your Team to Achieve Your Dream
We’ve all heard about the impact that effective communication may have on your dairy. Today’s blog, however, focuses on a particular aspect of effective communication: communicating your goals, vision and dreams to your team around you. Too often owners and leaders at the dairy hold their vision and their goals close to their chest, either afraid to be pushed back against, viewing it as a secret for only a select audience, or viewing it as their priority area and not others on the team. Why might more awareness and alignment among your team help to achieve your goals? Here’s a few thoughts:
Developing Self-Leadership
In this month’s vlog, Andre discusses what happens when you put a leader in the right place. What’s the difference between a “boss” and a “leader”? What is self-leadership? Watch the vlog to see Andre go over what happens when you put a leader in the right place and what that means for your farm’s standards, goals, benchmarks and team development.
Using Technology to Streamline Labor
Often it is difficult to truly measure the return on investment of a herd monitoring system. Likely, everyone is aware of the savings on hormone injections and the ability to get cows pregnant quickly when they’re ready. These are just one cost benefit. In the last year I had a farm put in a herd monitoring system and noticed that once we started getting used to the system we had to seriously re-evaluate our labor force and day to day tasks.