Building pride in your company is a not a one-and-done project - it's an ongoing effort that will pay dividends for you, your team and your company.  Pride breeds a sense of responsibitlity and ownership, a desire to succeed for yourself and your colleagues, a willingness to make the extra effort needed to get the job done and greater resilience.

Here are some key steps that will help you build pride within your company...

I had a great upbringing in a blue-collar family with a whole lot of love. I had compassion for other people and the clients I served; for my customers in St. Bernard. I was honored with their patronage for 17 years...

I stay continually amazed at how clueless many managers are about what their team members want, yet they’ve been managers for years. Ask questions of your team members and listen to their responses. Your job is to make sure they have one heart...

In business and in life, I have found that we go through three phases of attitude.

The first is excitement, as I mentioned on the previous page. The second is frustration, and the third is recommitment. 3 During and after Hurricane Katrina, all of New Orleans sank deeply into the frustration phase, myself included. Here are the six sub-phases of frustration that everyone in my business and personal life were experiencing...

As a Cajun might say, “This is an almost, mostly true story…”

A Yankee was lost on the beautiful, meandering south Louisiana
bayou called Blind River, right by Lake Ponchartrain Basin and the Bonnet
Carré Spillway. With cypress trees on every side, the Yankee pulled up to the
front of Whitey Duplessis’s river camp and hears the darndest moaning and
groaning from Bones, Whitey’s Catahoula hound dog.
​
The Yankee asks Whitey, “Excuse me, sir, what’s wrong with your dog?”

I read my 2007 goals for Chairman’s Circle several times every day. I had them taped to my credenza and thought about them all day, every day.

I enrolled my team in an Agency Development Program (ADP). It helped us to reengage, identify the building blocks, and to focus on being there for others and making a difference in their lives. ADP was about growth, finding common ground, reassessment, and self-evaluation...

Without a doubt the saddest part of the Katrina saga is the story of people stranded and left behind. People who crawled up into their ceilings to live for days without aid. Animals and humans all clung to anything they could grab hold of, hoping to survive the flood, only to die on the roofs with no food, water, or relief from the sun...