Founders' Reflections Archives | Turknett Leadership Group

How Coaching Can Help Foster Strong Retention

How Coaching Improves Retention Rates

Lyn Turknett, Co-founder and Co-chair, TLG People don’t leave companies – people leave their boss. That’s forever true, and anyone who has consulted in multiple organizations sees that borne out every day. One of the most fascinating things about doing organization engagement surveys is seeing tiny “pockets of engagement” – and loyalty – in an […]

October 26, 2023 View Article

Navigating Change: A How-to and a How to-not

Lyn Turknett, Co-founder and Co-chair, TLG The same qualities that help all of us expect, navigate, and even enjoy change – being curious, open, questioning, collaborative, agile and adaptable – help us whether we are managing change or navigating unexpected change. We were consulting in large organizations when the first waves of downsizing occurred […]

August 24, 2023 View Article

Ron Johnson, Paulette Corbin, and the Three Levels of Change Leadership

Lyn Turknett, Co-founder and Co-chair, TLG This article was originally posted in April of 2014. I’ve followed the sad decline of JC Penney over the past few years – it’s a classic story of how NOT to lead change. Ron Johnson, fresh from overwhelming success in creating Apple’s retail stores, came in on a […]

August 24, 2023 View Article

How to Encode a Common Language into Your Culture

Lyn Turknett, Co-founder and Co-chair, TLG The “common language” of a culture, in my experience, usually revolves around values and principles that are foundational and that are understood across cultures and generations. The values are often core to the business. For example, “high reliability” organizations, ones that deal in life and death (think healthcare, aviation, […]

July 27, 2023 View Article

Want to Build a Bigger, More Inclusive Table? Focus on the Small Moments

Lyn Turknett, Co-founder and Co-chair, TLG We have always believed that a culture that makes every member of the organization feel included, one where everyone feels heard and everyone feels able to speak up, is a culture that leads to both high engagement and high performance. We also know, though (and we’ve seen it in […]

June 21, 2023 View Article

Keeping Up: Seven Ways to Pursue Self-Development

By Lyn Turknett Co-founder and Co-chair, TLG “Keeping up” – and continuing to learn – is probably my favorite part of any job. I think I come by it honestly. I’ve told the story before of my mother, who was born in 1906 and was in graduate school and working all the time while I […]

March 22, 2023 View Article

Ditching the Balancing Act by Integrating Work with Life

By Lyn Turknett Co-founder and Co-chair, TLG Work-life balance implies that we have two things we are keeping in balance. We have to work, but we hope to also have some time for “life.” Work-life integration recognizes that we have one precious life, which is filled with many things, and one of them is work. […]

February 23, 2023 View Article

Leadership Development Then and Now – What Hasn’t Changed

By Lyn Turknett Co-founder and Co-chair, TLG About 25 years ago we had an experience that showed the shocking power of development opportunities. A super-talented, high-powered salesperson at a large telecom was about to leave. Her boss was frantic. Amazingly, it wasn’t a retention bonus that kept her, or a promise of a promotion. She […]

January 25, 2023 View Article

Leadership Character is for Everyone

By Lyn Turknett Co-founder and Co-chair, TLG Someone asked recently whether the Leadership Character Model came first or our book – Decent People, Decent Company – came first. The answer is that the model came first, and in thinking about the years in the early 1990’s when my husband and business partner, Bob Turknett, were […]

October 26, 2022 View Article

A Guide to Identifying High Potentials

By Lyn Turknett Co-founder and Co-chair, TLG Thinking about how we identify high potentials in organizations is a really big question. There are three things that come to my mind that organizations should likely be thinking about: 1. Should you be paying more attention to all your talent, not just those selected as high […]

September 26, 2022 View Article