Your weekly source of sales, marketing, customer service, and management insight - compliments of ETE REMAN

management

Coaching Your Weakest Team Member

We’ve all heard these sayings: the bad apple, the weakest link in the chain, the black sheep in the family. Do these simple phrases define a person and give no room for improvement?  When dealing with a member of your team who is not measuring up to your or your team’s standards, what can you […]

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You Can’t Always Get What You Want

You can’t always get what you want.  I learned this life lesson as a child, partly from my parents and partly from The Rolling Stones. It holds true today, especially as we venture through this crazy year. I want to go to Disney. I want to see my friends and my family. I want to […]

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How to Catch a Fly

Sunlight and a warm breeze flowed leisurely through the open bay doors of Hometown Motors’ service department on the second Monday of June.  Wafting in on the breeze was the distinct aroma of bratwurst and burgers earning their stripes on the grill just outside the rear door. Combined with the hint of grilling onion, the […]

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Making a List and Checking it Twice

On Friday we have a really big thing happening.  An assembly of 20 people from 7 states.  There are A LOT of things on the list: flights to book, hotels accommodations, local transportation logistics, name tags, logo clothing, swag bags, meals, agendas, speakers notes, out of office messaging, training room a/v, headsets for a facility […]

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A General Never Blames His Troops

“A general never blames his troops.” It was a statement I needed to hear. I was a part of a very big, very important project that hadn’t turned out according to expectations. It wasn’t all my fault, but mistakes were made by many including me – and including the general. Up to this point, I […]

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The Tale of the Sprinting Hippo

Some people call me the ‘The Sprinting Hippo’ and I don’t mind it at all. I coach and play for a softball team during the summers, and, just like the noble hippopotamus that can reach top speeds of 30 mph (it’s true, look it up!), I am much faster than you might assume just by […]

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Is Your Team Performing or Storming?

When there’s a lack of harmony on a team, chances are everyone is aware of it on some level, even if it’s just a vague sense of something’s not quite right. It could be really bad, palpable even from a distance – there could be internal turmoil, talking behind colleagues’ backs (which is never as […]

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You're A Poet: A Leadership Exercise

This morning at an off-site leadership training session, Captain Reman challenged his office managers and your loyal REMAN U writers to write a poem… about leadership… inspired by our natural surroundings at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Society. In a fashion consistent with his character, he didn’t tell us why we were doing this activity, just […]

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Fish Stink From the Head

ETE REMAN’s founder, Sam Loshak, is known for his many insightful and pithy statements. We’ve regularly refer to his statements as “Sam-isms.” One of Sam’s most frequent reminders to ETE’s leadership is “fish stink from the head.” What Sam means is that the worst smelling part of a dead fish is its head. But what Sam […]

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Slow to Hire, Quick to Fire

“Slow to hire, quick to fire” is one of the countless philosophies on how to staff a business.  As much as we have an official hiring policy here, it’s at the very least to hire slowly. Every candidate goes through a series of interviews with a variety of staff members, tours the office space, and […]

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