Q2, 2023 Newsletter
In This Issue:
- A People Perspective: The 6 Types of Working Genius (and a special offer!)
- A Business Perspective: Optimizing Your Customer Journey
- A Leadership Perspective: The Future is Fractional
- A Data Perspective: The 3 Keys to an Awesome Data Roadmap
- A Personal Perspective: The Hope of New Beginnings
A People Perspective: The 6 Types of Working Genius (and a special offer below!)
"This groundbreaking new model and assessment have revolutionized the way I look at work and teams. I am excited for everyone to understand their gifts and frustrations so they can better experience fulfillment and dignity in their work." ~Patrick Lencioni
Working Genius is Patrick Lencioni’s newest teamwork model, which helps people understand how they can contribute to work most effectively. This tool can help individuals, leaders and teams better leverage one another’s strengths and understand how to be both productive and fulfilled at work.
Working Genius is simply the fastest and simplest way to discover your gifts and transform your work. This model can be used in a variety of ways to bring greater success and fulfillment:
- Maximize joy and fulfillment
- Increase productivity
- Build effective teams
- Lead better meetings
- Improve hiring
- Boost morale
Working with a Certified Facilitator can transform work for people by taking their Working Genius even further:
- Understand why they have been successful or unsuccessful in past endeavors
- Clarify which types of work give joy and energy and which types are draining and difficult
- Avoid making unfair and inaccurate judgments about one another’s motivation
- Alleviate guilt about struggles people have with certain types of work
- Improve dialogue and directives in team meetings
- Make quick and concrete adjustments to roles and responsibilities to better tap into one another’s strengths and avoid one another’s weaknesses
- Get more done in less time
The iBusiness Group is excited to be a Certified Working Genius Facilitator. And, we want to share our excitement with you!
As a special offer to The iBusiness Group network, we are providing Working Genius assessments for the first two teams to book and complete a Working Genius assessment by April 30, 2023. You will get individual assessments for up to 8 people, plus a facilitated team workshop, for just the cost of the assessment itself, which is $25 per person. For a team of 8, that is only $200!
Elevate your team's performance and fulfillment today by submitting an inquiry for "Working Genius Assessment." We look forward to helping you discover your Working Genius.
A Business Perspective: Optimizing Your Customer Journey
How does a small company with half of its pre-pandemic staffing level and limited IT support, go from a largely manual marketing process with millions of prospects in flat files to an end-to-end marketing process that is simple, stable, secure, integrated, and future-ready? With a CDP, or customer data platform.
One definition of a Customer Data Platform is “packaged software that collects data from online and offline sources in real-time to create a unified view of the customer, powering highly-personalized marketing campaigns.” In other words, it is a pre-built solution that collects all relevant customer-related data -- think CRM, website, third-party data like demographics, and more -- into a central system where that data can be cleansed, standardized, enriched, and managed, and then the CDP makes that high-quality data available for other business processes and systems. For this client, the data will be used primarily for targeted, multi-channel marketing.
While the customer data platform is the intended solution, it has taken much more than a technology to meet the objective. It has required all four of The Execution Disciplines™ to successfully navigate this journey.
A Leadership Perspective: The Future is Fractional
Within just a couple of days last month, I saw two pieces published on LinkedIn. The first article listed 8 reasons why organizations can't fill headcount:
- Too busy fighting fires to focus on hiring
- Hiring managers don't know how to effectively find the best candidate
- Spending too long making a decision
- Looking for perfection
- Drowning in poor process
- Too many decision makers
- Forgetting the true cost of vacancies
- Messing up employer basics and creating a bad reputation
The second article published in Forbes discussed How C-Suites Can Leverage the New Wave of Fractional Leaders.
The iBusiness Group is part of this new wave of fractional leaders. A fractional chief data officer (CDO), chief information officer (CIO), or chief operations officer (COO) can not only address the eight reasons why you might not be filling headcount, but more importantly, a fractional leader can jump in immediately to:
- Create a new capability, a new strategy, or a new organization within your company,
- Rescue a failed initiative or missed quarterly rocks, or
- At a minimum, sustain your current momentum while you take the time you need to make the right hire
A new wave of fractional leaders are bringing value to the C-Suite and The iBusiness Group would love to pinch hit for you. Also, we are connected to networks of fractional leaders in marketing, finance, sales, and operations. If you know of a need, submit an inquiry for "fractional or interim leadership." We would be happy to help you or connect you to someone who can.
A Data Perspective: The 3 Keys to an Awesome Data Roadmap
Over the years, I have encountered many companies who want the benefits of what data can offer. They hear success stories from other companies, they hear the promises of data from consulting and software companies, and their IT departments lead them to believe they too can achieve success. In fairness, some do see success quickly, but far more reach a marginal level of success at best, or even a highly-visible and painful failure.
To simplify what is often an overly-complicated topic, there are three keys to a data roadmap that work: data readiness, data assets, and data maturity.
The objective of data readiness is to improve business and project outcomes by de-risking the project, increasing the likelihood of success, and minimizing the time-to-value. Read the full article on Data Readiness...
The data assets pillar to our data roadmap addresses the challenges of IT-centric, application-centric, and project-centric mindsets. A paradigm shift to a data-centric, product-centric mindset can elevate data to a business strategy level so that data is seen and treated as a business asset. Read the full article on Data Assets...
Data and analytics maturity is a concept often brought up in data roadmap conversations yet most organizations do not know what data maturity looks like, how to evaluate data maturity, or where they are in their data maturity journey. Read the full article on Data Maturity...
The benefits of data assets are necessary for the data readiness component of our data roadmap as much as data readiness is needed for the data assets identified, prioritized, and created within our data roadmap. These two components of our data roadmap, working together and feeding off each other will open up the opportunities necessary to achieve the often-illusive data maturity and data-driven culture we seek.
A Personal Perspective: The Hope of New Beginnings
I love new beginnings. This can include many things:
- The first signs of a new spring, which is coming very slowly to Minnesota this year
- New learnings and insights, like The 6 Types of Working Genius discussed above
- Starting and building a new company, which I have been doing this year with The iBusiness Group and having a ton of fun
- Providing new inspiration, encouragement, or hope to someone who was recently laid off and wrestling with the ups and downs of that journey
New beginnings are full of hope and excitement, and are also often accompanied by at least a little bit of fear and even chaos at times. But, the hope for a better future is what keeps us moving forward. It is the hope and warmth of spring after a long, cold winter. It is the hope and understanding of our God-given talents or working genius to create value for others. It is the hope and relief of a new job at the end of a stressful unemployment journey.
When we encounter challenging times -- financially, relationally, professionally, emotionally -- some days seem too tough or too long to endure. And yet, the human spirit can endure a lot if there is at least a little bit of possibility, of encouragement, of support, of hope for a better future.
At this time of year, my family looks forward to celebrating Easter, the time in the Christian calendar that we remember the darkest day on Good Friday when our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified and the best day on Easter Sunday when our Savior rose from the dead, giving us hope and restoring our relationship with God.
I have needed to rely on Christ's hope a lot this past year -- personally, professionally, and spiritually. It has sustained me through many tough days and has brought me into a closer relationship with God, not because of anything I have done or could do, but solely because of the love, grace, and forgiveness he has extended to me.
I hope you know this hope, too. If not, I would encourage you to find a church to attend on Easter Sunday and search for the hope of a new beginning in your life. Below are three churches I would recommend. If these locations are not near to where you live, I would be happy to help find a good option for you or join one of these online. Just reach out to me at timbrands@ibusinessgroup.us.
We love feedback. Please leave a comment or question on the content of this issue or suggest a topic for a future issue.
