My Favorite Mistake: Business Lessons from Failures and Success Manufacturing Executive Martina Kuhlmeyer Had Too Many High-Priority Initiatives
Founder of Power Up Your Team
Episode page with video, transcript, and more
My guest for Episode #187 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Martina Kuhlmeyer, the Founder of Power Up Your Team — and she’s the host of a podcast with that same name.
As Leadership Coach and Team Building Strategist, she is guiding CEOs and Founders in high-growth companies to build a resilient team so they can scale and win in the marketplace.
Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Martina spent 30+ years working for small and several fortune 100 companies, including General Electric, Textron, Fidelity Investments and Liberty Mutual. Martina held a variety of executive roles focused on continuous improvement AND driving large strategic change initiatives. As P&L owner, she managed the successful turnaround of a $1.3 billion asset portfolio management company.
Martina was born and raised in Germany.
In this episode, Martina tells her favorite mistake story about starting to use a management process called “strategy deployment” (a.k.a. "hoshin kanri") and how she overcomplicated it by having too many “high-priority” initiatives. Why did she and others on her team make that mistake? How did they recover? And how did they work to create a culture that adjusts and learns from mistakes?
We also talk about questions and topics including:
- We were introduced by Karyn Ross from Episode 3
- Karyn's foundation - the Love and Kindness Project
- “Strategy Deployment” (or “Hoshin Kanri“)
- What was the Impact of this mistake? – over processing
- What did you learn and how did you adjust? — “reflection and insight”
- A mistake to think you’re going to do something new in a perfect way?
- Mistake of having too many “high priority” initiatives?
- How do you create a culture in an organization where learning from mistakes is a reality?
- Mistake to use too much jargon around continuous improvement?
- “Strategy alignment” vs “strategy deployment”
- Mistake to have a large scale initiative (like Lean or Six Sigma) when the CEO isn’t full leading it?
- Tell us about the podcast