Currie Management Consultants, Inc.’s two-day, multi-industry conference

Why should you register for Leadership from the Inside Out?  This is an event for top performers to collaborate with other North American Industry Leaders!  This is a multi-industry conference and will combine “movers and shakers” from the following fields:  Farm Equipment, Transport Refrigeration, Material Handling, Power Generation, Commercial Tire, Construction Equipment, Utility Vehicles and others.  Join The Currie Team as we come together to share insights, best practices, challenges, victories, philosophies* and more.  Register Today!!  (*Remember this year’s Reading List Theme:  The Philosophy of Distribution—click here for The List!)

 Breakout Session IEE: Improved Employee Engagement.  This breakout group is led by Michelle Currie and will focus on the topic of engagement, and how it applies to your distribution company.  Why do we need to know this?

1. Studies show that companies with employees who are not engaged, using the traditional definition, are at higher risk for dips in productivity.
2. Employees with low engagement scores are more frequently absent.
3. Employee turnover is higher in companies with low employee engagement.
4. When engagement is low, customer service standards are more likely to decline.

The Currie Team will present comprehensive information about Engagement, and the drivers of engagement: Enablement, and Energy.  These items make up the formula for a highly successful workforce, in an age where we cannot afford to be otherwise.  Lean is here to stay, along with the critical practice of talent management, and the need for great leadership.  The Currie Team will skillfully guide participants through several important concepts to help create and sustain the engagement model within your organization, and your results will include increased retention and improved productivity.  What else can we expect from enhancing our company’s employee engagement?

1. Engaged employees believe in the company’s goals and objectives, and will work to achieve them.
2. Companies with highly engaged employees are more likely to attract high-quality candidates for open positions.
3. Employees who are engaged are more willing to go the extra mile for the sake of the company.

Breakout Session ELR:  Evolving Leadership Roles as Companies Grow.  John VanDeusen will lead this session and will take participants on “The Journey of the Dealer Principal from Operator to Executive to Investor”.  We will be talking about “Quality of Leadership” at the top of, and within your organization.  After you return from this session, you will be able to examine the bench strength of your company and ask the question: how is our enterprise leveraging talent?  The ability to create the conditions and environment for success are important characteristics of a strong leader.  Additionally, successful executives possess four critical skills which enable them to lead a team through periods of transformation and growth:  Change Mastery, Interpersonal Finesse, Mental Agility, and Goal Orientation.  Let’s examine each of those skills.

• Change Mastery – this skill is most essential in changing times. The ability to adapt to varying conditions assists these managers in behaving strategically.  Masters of change are also tenacious in their efforts to continue learning and improving.
• Interpersonal Finesse – this skill always begins with self-awareness. Executives and managers who possess this proficiency have an ability to embrace conflict and harness it for creative ends.  These leaders are also highly competent at varying their leadership style to fit the situation.
• Mental Agility – this is the infinitely important ability to confront ambiguity. Leaders who achieve a heightened level of mental agility are adept at pursuing complexity, and often explore opportunities through the Socratic approach of asking penetrating questions.
• Goal Orientation – an ability to address one’s own performance and the performance of others in a systematic, developmental, and strategic way. Managers who are goal oriented prioritize skillfully, are highly focused, and are often described as “acting on purpose”.

Additionally, participants will be introduced to the concept of decreasing specific actions and increasing others in order to move up the ladder effectively.

Also featured will be Currie Management Consultants, Inc.’s comprehensive program entitled Executive Roles in a Distribution Company, which examines and analyses the structure of successful distribution companies.

Roundtable Topic SGO:  Setting Goals and Objectives.  In this session all participants will learn about the creation and utilization of The Currie Financial Model.  In the distribution of industrial equipment, consistent tracking and analysis of financial and other activities enables dealer principals and executives to stay on top of their performance results each and every day. Some results are short-term (employee productivity measures, rental multiple, and the like) and should be reviewed on a regular basis in order to discover and implement tactical variations.  Others measures are more long term, such as Debt to Equity, ROA, and Absorption, and indicate the critical liquidity results of the business, thus allowing the executive team to manage capital effectively and create long-term strategy.  The results of all of these financial measures provide us with the profile of a well-run industrial equipment distribution company.

Financial Benchmarking is the cornerstone of a sound company.  And the numbers that the executives and manager are exposed to in the Currie Financial Composite are meant to identify areas of the business that need further attention.  Also, identifying areas that are running well can help us: think about what’s going on, and think about how to apply some of those specific practices to an area of the business that is struggling.  As Robin Currie always says:  “The numbers tell a story!”