Jane Adamson
CEO, Sherpa Advisory
Jane Adamson is committed to leading and developing an organization to achieve superior results. She has the unique ability to view business globally, while focusing employees on the details and teamwork necessary for strategic success. She has been the president of two manufacturing/service organizations, sat on industry and professional boards, orchestrated the successful turnaround of a financially distressed organization, and implemented numerous performance management processes. She founded Sherpa Advisory, located in Phoenix, Arizona, to guide companies through the growth stages that require mid-size companies to “do” all the things that large companies do, but with limited resources. Company survival depends upon its leaders and members learning the skills of providing clear focus, team problem solving, implementing change, and executing for results.
Recent posts by Jane Adamson
Difficult conversations: the longer you wait, the worse they get!
Posted on September 27th, 2011
You know the one. It’s the difficult conversation you need to have with an employee who isn’t doing the job, or causing a problem, or doesn’t play well with others. The one that keeps you up at night and causes your stomach to feel like the butterflies inside you are learning the Latin rhumba. The number of excuses you’ve come up with to evade the issue is a testament to your creativity.
That perfect set of circumstances that you’re waiting for is simply not going to happen. And you know that the longer you wait, the worse things get and the more difficult the issue becomes to address. So instead of procrastinating and suffering, have the conversation! The key is to prepare in 3 separate steps.
The Accountability Conundrum
Posted on May 20th, 2011
This post is the first of many guest posts we’ll begin publishing for the CEO Challenge. As we announced yesterday, Jane has launched Sherpa Advisory and will focus on guiding companies with 25-500 employees to achieve excellence in EXECUTION. Don’t worry, we will continue delivering our popular strategic planning service together, and Jane is still a tightly integrated partner of The Revenue Game!
The Fierce Urgency of Now
Posted on February 1st, 2011
“We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
This quote about fierce urgency and procrastination should resonate when we all realize how quickly January 2011 has flown by. Now there are only 11 months left to reach your 2011 goals. Q2 is around the corner, and if you’re off track in Q1, the rest of the year may be in jeopardy. Don’t allow one more year of missed opportunity. In that short amount of time, your company could easily end up “standing bare, naked, and dejected” when the competition cleanly passes you by.
It’s not as if companies don’t want to meet their goals. They try to meet them. But there’s a hard truth here: if they aren’t meeting goals on a regular basis, something needs to change. Let’s discuss what gets in the way of achieving results: obstacles, aka problems.
What are your odds?
Posted on January 4th, 2011
It’s easy to be confident that you’ll meet your 2011 goals – after all, you have 12 new months ahead of you. But in his book 8th Habit, Stephen Covey provides a sobering analogy: 37% of employees have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why, and only 1 in 5 employees has a clear “line of sight” between individual tasks and the team’s goals.
Now comes the sobering part: what if a soccer team had those stats? Only 4 of 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs, and only 2 of 11 would know what position they play and what they’re supposed to do.
