Rich Hazeltine on Building a Resilient Company

This week, lean consultant Rich Hazeltine joins the Lean Frontline podcast to discuss the importance of emotional intelligence, strong leadership, and the effectiveness of trust on the frontline contribute to a resilient company.

Rich Hazeltine is an ICF Certified Coach and Principal Consultant for Rich Integration based in Las Vegas. Hazeltine works to help organizations measure and optimize the talent and motivators of their workforce as a strategy to produce the best results and performance. Hazeltine has experience in a variety of fields, including neuroscience, predictive analytics, behavior science, and coaching. Hazeltine earned a BS in Management at the University of Houston, and an MBA at the University of Texas El Paso.

In this week’s podcast, Hazeltine discusses the value that comes from investing emotional intelligence into your workforce. “If we move emotional intelligence on this competency by X percent, this will have an impact on turnover by this much that turnover costs you this many dollars per year.”

This increased focus on emotional intelligence helps save recruiting costs and leads to better performance from the workforce. Hazeltine explains that the value and benefit of these emotional intelligence skills manifested in the next few years after implementation, and led to company-wide growth and major savings on turnover costs.

Hazeltine stresses the importance of strong leadership and how it can connect your employees to work towards a common goal together. “It’s all about connecting people to purpose and accomplishment and to one another.”

According to Hazeltine, the role of a good leader is to connect people to something bigger than themselves. By allowing your workforce to get together and contribute, new ideas and methods can be created, leading to further continuous improvement in a connected workforce. “Anything that can make them feel like they’re part of something bigger and contributing is making a huge difference in that workforce productivity.”

For more interviews from lean legends such as Paul Acker and Norman Bodek, tune in to The Lean Frontline!