Kevin Burns

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Workplace Expert - Management Consultant - Keynote Speaker Expert

Kevin Burns Quick Facts

Main Areas: Attitude, Employee Engagement, Leadership, Excellence, Service, Safety, Accountability
Career Focus: Workplace Expert - Consultant - Speaker
Affiliation: BGi Consultants

-based consulting organization. We offer strategic expertise in three specific areas: Human Resources and Recruitment, Middle-Management/Front-line Supervisors and also in the development of building Cultures around Corporate Safety. Our choice to excel in these three areas is based on recurring problems we see in many organizations - organizations who are not prepared to wait for the "right" employee and instead settle for the "right now" employee. Organizations that have no strategic plan in how they hire and manage people will always find themselves scrambling to fill holes in their workforce.

Instead, we believe that organizations must begin to look to a different model of attracting and managing workers. And here is an overview of the strategic direction that we offer to our clients:

1. Employee Effectiveness - is beyond simple Employee Engagement. Getting employees to engage on their tasks is easy. Making them become effective at their tasks takes a whole different set of skills and really, do you hire employees to be simply mentally present or results-based effective? It's the results of the job that matter far more than how well they stayed engaged while they did the job. Engagement of an employee is a matter of opinion. What appears to be disengagement by one might seem as creative pursuits to problem solving by another. Employee levels of engagement are in direct proportion to how their immediate manager engages them. No, we believe that it is the effectiveness of the employee that matters more.

2. Relevant Management - Research shows that, on average, a manager only actually manages employees 8 hours out of a 40-hour week. The rest is spent in meetings, putting out fires and handling personnel issues. You don't want busy managers wasting time on useless things that don't improve productivity. You want relevant managers, doing relevant tasks that get relevant results. People-work, not paperwork. Irrelevant managers keep busy doing unimportant things. Many of a manager's irrelevant tasks could be delegated. There will always be managers who want to get paid for the hard parts of management work without actually doing them. Offering feedback is one of those hard parts. One of the key components in making employees more effective is management feedback - often - daily if possible. A single golf-lesson annually won't make you a pro. In the same way, an annual performance review is ineffective. To build effectiveness requires regular feedback. Being available for employees and mentoring them and coaching them is relevant management.

3. Collaborative Safety - Collaboration builds teams organically: teams who watch out for each other, support each other and care about each other. The top-down "compliance" philosophy of safety, which many organizations employ, is out-dated because it dictates that employees aren't smart enough to look after each other and therefore, must have a set of rules, procedures and processes to comply with. That may be because these organizations are hiring the wrong people. However, Collaborative Safety ensures employees have each others' backs and builds a peer-based strategy of collectively avoiding danger and unnecessary risk. A safe workplace is a happy and productive workplace that easily attracts other high-performers

Free Articles & Book Excerpts

"Tough Labor Market" As An Excuse

http://www.kevburns.com/2008/02/tough-labor-market-as-excuse.html

Employee Tip #12 - You Are Not Entitled To Anything

http://www.kevburns.com/2008/02/employee-tip-12-you-are-not-entitled-to_06.html

How To Move Into Management

http://www.kevburns.com/2008/03/how-to-move-into-management.html

Five Tips To Engaging Employees

http://www.kevburns.com/2008/03/five-tips-to-engaging-employees.html

Customer Service Isn't Just A Department

http://www.kevburns.com/2008/02/customer-service-isnt-just-department.html

The Three Most Important Things In Life

http://www.kevburns.com/2008/01/three-most-important-things-in-life.html

Employee Training Ends At Competence

http://www.kevburns.com/2007/11/employee-training-ends-at-competence.html

Employee Tip #10 - Why Companies Don't Want You To Improve

http://www.kevburns.com/2007/11/employee-tip-10-why-companies-dont-want.html

Boss Tip #14 - Leading/Managing High Performers

http://www.kevburns.com/2007/11/boss-tip-14-leadingmanaging-high.html

Free Audio & Video Samples

Watch Kevin Burns Live Right Now

http://kevburns.com/video

Kevin Burns Audio & Video Programs

Kevin Burns Live - Trust The Process Audio CD

http://www.kevburns.com/store

Kevin Burns Books

Go Ahead. Give Me Attitude!

http://www.kevburns.com/store

This Got Me To Thinking

http://www.kevburns.com/store

This Got Me To Thinking ... Too!

http://www.kevburns.com/store

If It takes A Village To Raise a Child, How Then Do You Explain The Village Idiot ... and other things I've said.

http://www.kevburns.com/store

Knock Knock! Who's There? The Out-Of-Your-Mind Approach To Cold-Calling!

http://www.kevburns.com/store

Unleashing you! The 9 Key Principles To Living The Life You want

http://www.kevburns.com/store

Articles by this expert

SelfGrowth articles and saved writing connected to this expert.

39 total

Article

Mediocre Attitudes And The Downfall of Greatness

It all started innocently enough as I was looking for casters. I had this idea for a piece of exercise equipment and decided to build a prototype but I needed casters - those swivel wheels that go under office chairs, carts, etc. I had to ask three sales clerks where to find them in the big box hardware store before the third clerk actually looked in the computer to figure out where they stocked them. Reluctantly, I purchased four casters from them. It turns out that it wasn't just the service that was lousy.

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Article

The Attitude of "Good Enough"

If you've been watching TV recently, you will have seen the new commercials for GM. GM is now touting their quality - something the average consumer is certainly not used to seeing GM do. It first surprised me a little that GM decided it was time to start marketing quality over price. This is not something I'm used to from GM. In fact, not too long ago, there were commercials on television selling GM cars at one dollar over invoice. Quality wasn't an issue then. It was all about price. But now, it's all about quality. But is it?

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Article

#1 In Sales Means Nothing

The sign in the front window of my local UPS Store reads. "#2 Store in Canada." I laugh every time I see it. It's too rare that you see a sign reading "#2" in anything. I get it though. Wayne and the staff at my UPS Store do a great job and give great service. They're always busy. Apparently they're busy enough to be #2 in Canada in volume. And if next year they're #3, I'm sure that's what the sign will read. But what about this #1 Salesman stuff or Salesman of the Year? Does it matter?

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Article

Why Teamwork is a Bad Idea

Before you think teamwork is the answer and spend large sums of money on “team-building” exercises, maybe you should consider whether your place of business needs teams at all. Perhaps more would get done by leaving your people alone to do what they already excel at. Forcing people to join teams simply for the sake of “inclusion” is a bad idea. The 20-60-20 rule applies to all organizations, companies, committees and teams. The top twenty percent of the members will be go-getters – those who want to change the world before five o’clock.

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Article

The Hard Truth About Soft-Skills

There are 350,000 opinions (books) on “leadership” on Amazon. Corporate America can’t seem to draw a consensus on what leadership is so it’s really no big surprise that Corporate America can’t figure out what soft-skills are and why they are important either. You know, for being such a dominating force in the world of business, we really don’t have a clue about the stuff that REALLY makes business run.

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Article

The iPod and the Downfall of Social Interaction

How many times have you placed a call to a client, a business or a colleague or friend only to reach voice mail? Then within two or three minutes of leaving your message they call you right back. Sometimes they’re honest about it and sometimes they lie but they’ve really been using voice mail to screen their calls. This is just one of a long list of items of what is wrong with Corporate America. We don’t allow people talk to us anymore.

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Article

Instant Leaders Overnight

The Global Leadership Forecast 2008/09 researched 12,208 business executives and 1493 Human Resource professionals across 76 countries. Seventy-five percent of executives surveyed identified improving their leadership talent as their #1 priority for organizational success. But the vast majority of those same respondents have no idea of exactly what leadership is. It is astounding that so many people, when asked to define leadership, can have so many varying answers. In fact, there are 350,000 books on Amazon with "Leadership" in the title. That's 350,000 opinions on what leadership is.

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Article

Leadership and Management Are Opposites

Log into any business networking site, like LinkedIn or Ryze, and almost daily will you see someone asking a question attempting to determine the difference between Leadership and Management. What are really interesting are the people who are asking: people in management or leadership positions.

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Article

Good Business Attitude Comes from Consequences

Consequences are the guideposts of your moral compass. If there were no consequences, people would run roughshod over each other. Items in your garage would be stolen by your neighbors. Police forces would become irrelevant. You would leave the doors unlocked because, what’s the point? Business would hire Grade 6 dropouts into senior management positions. You get the idea.

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Article

***Career or Job?

I met Wendy years ago when I took a job as a restaurant manager. For me, the management position was a job. It wasn’t my career as I hadn’t prepared myself to become a restaurant manager. Heck, I’d never even worked in a restaurant prior. But I had eaten in plenty of restaurants. I had a good ...

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Article

***Is Stress Really the Problem?

The Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health conducted a survey to determine the Top Ten Stressors at work. Here they are:nn * 10. "The treadmill syndrome" - Employees who consistently have too much or too little to do create a lot of stress.n * 9. "Random ...

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Article

***The Résumé is Dead

What is a résumé? It’s nothing more than a collection of things you’ve done in your work life – a sort-of “eulogy” at work. Oh sure, it may also point out some skills that you were allowed to use while on the job but it really gives no indication of your aptitude, your natural talents nor your ...

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Websites & resources

SelfGrowth-published websites, downloads, and contributor profile websites connected to this expert.

1 total

Website

Kevin Burns - Author & Attitude Adjuster

Kevin Burns, Corporate Attitude Strategist, is a worldwide authority on Attitude and author of his forthcoming, “Your Attitude Sucks - Fixing What's Wrong With Corporate America” He is an outstanding keynote speaker. He is opinionated, blunt, direct, funny, thought-provoking, incredibly well-researched and usually … right!

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Favorite Quotes & Thoughts from Kevin Burns

There are people in every organization who are just looking for an opportunity to be offended. So at 9:00 tomorrow morning, walk up to their desk and offend them. Now they can actually be productive for a change.

If it takes a village to raise a child, how then do you explain the village idiot?

The things that happen today prepare you for what is coming tomorrow. That is called "the process." Trust it.

It’s not that people want us to fail; it’s just that they don’t want us to succeed. When we succeed, we show them what could have been done with a little effort.

When all else fails, there’s always success. Go ahead. Make mistakes. Get over it.

At the end of life, I’ve never heard anyone say, “I wish I’d been less successful and more stupid.” Get better. Get smarter. Learn as much as you can. Do as much as humanly possible.

The trick to consistently thinking outside of the box is to never get in the box in the first place.

People hire us for our skill and then fire us for the crap we bring with it.

With every bad job, bad relationship and bad event in our lives, there is only one common denominator. Figure it out and you’ll be free.

Life is like a hockey game: there are those who play and there are those who pay to watch those who play. Then there are those who show up late and ask, “What did I miss?”

We’re not resistant to change: just sudden change.

A routine is one step away from a rut.

Leadership is not a title or a position. It is a way of life and an attitude.

Contacting Kevin Burns

Kevin Burns - Workplace Expert - Management Consultant - Keynote Speaker
Engagement - Management - Safety

http://www.kevburns.com

#719, 105-150 Crowfoot CR, NW, Calgary, AB, Canada T3G 3T2

How to get started

International Attitude Expert Kevin Burns is a masterful communicator. He knows how to get your attention, how to keep it and how to get you to make profound changes in a short period of time. And if you don’t start making changes after your time with Kevin, well ... then you don’t want to!