Ep: 145 Jen Thornton

CULTIVATE POSITIVE CULTURE

Buy it here: CultivatePositiveCulture.com

Jennifer has developed her expertise in Talent Strategy & Leadership Professional Development over her exciting 20+ year career as an HR Professional.

She’s led international teams across Greater China, Mexico, the U.K., and the U.S. to expand into new markets, managing franchise retailers, and developing key strategic partnerships – all while exceeding business objectives and financial results.

The rapid growth of her consulting firm 304 Coaching has been largely due to Jennifer’s unconventional approach to building innovative workforce development solutions for companies that are facing breakthrough growth and accelerated hiring patterns.

She is a sought-after business strategist, specializing in startups and large value-based organizations. She assists her clients in building talent strategies that complement their business strategies to ensure exponential growth.

She lives in Texas with her family and rescues. In her free time, she enjoys reading, historic preservation, remodeling her lake home, and spending time with friends.

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Show Notes:

• Jen’s biggest two habits are:
  • She never goes to bed without learning something new every single day.
  • She hires experts to be experts. She stays focused on where her interests lie and where her strengths are.
    • She hires people like this around her.
• A talent strategy is understanding what work needs to be done in an organization and how and then making sure that you’re bringing in the right people who are talented.
• Each hiring decision is the business leader’s responsibility.
• A lot of complacency in the workplace is driven by the leaders’ ways of leading.
  • Teams just do what they’re told.
• Often a lack of creativity and lack of inspiration is because of over-management.
• Early trouble signs in your organization are if you’re asking yourself:
  • Why are people not communicating with me?
  • Why hasn’t anyone come to me with ideas?
  • Why is everyone complacent?
• You need to be able to have very honest conversations and have trust and safety in that.
• Leaders make the mistake of thinking about talent over business, but talent will take care of business.
• Business leaders need to switch their mindset from hours in the seat to getting business results.
• Get honest about the work.
• Some of what businesses do isn’t necessary.
• Jen asks her clients:
  • Is this mission critical?
  • Is it nice to do?
  • Is it a habit?
  • Is it vanity work?
• It’s important to always have the right people in the room for a decision.
  • You need your leaders to have a futuristic mindset.
• A company becomes outdated when it gets attached to a habit.
  • You have to be open and evolve.
• Workers have fun when they’re getting things done and being collaborative.
• To get people to buy in, you have to communicate.
• The first steps to move forward are:
  • Becoming a spectator of your company. Listen without judgments and without expectations.
  • Looking who is on your team who you know will have honest conversations with you.
  • Thinking about how you lead and how your actions are getting the results you don’t want.

Jen Thornton’s Recharge Round