My Favorite Mistake — 187: Manufacturing Executive Martina Kuhlmeyer Had Too Many High-Priority Initiatives

Founder of Power Up Your Team

Episode page with video, transcript, and more

My guest for Episode #187 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Martina Kuhlmeyer, the Founder of Power Up Your Team — and she’s the host of a podcast with that same name.

As Leadership Coach and Team Building Strategist, she is guiding CEOs and Founders in high-growth companies to build a resilient team so they can scale and win in the marketplace.

Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Martina spent 30+ years working for small and several fortune 100 companies, including General Electric, Textron, Fidelity Investments and Liberty Mutual.Martina held a variety of executive roles focused on continuous improvement AND driving large strategic change initiatives. As P&L owner, she managed the successful turnaround of a $1.3 billion asset portfolio management company.

Martina was born and raised in Germany.

In this episode, Martina tells her favorite mistake story about starting to use a management process called “strategy deployment” and she overcomplicated it by having too many “high-priority” initiatives? Why did she and others on her team make that mistake? How did they recover? And how did they work to create a culture that adjusts and learns from mistakes?

We also talk about questions and topics including:

  • We were introduced by Karyn Ross from Episode 3
  • Karyn’s foundation – the Love and Kindness Project
  • “Strategy Deployment” (or “Hoshin Kanri“)
  • What was the Impact of this mistake? – over processing
  • What did you learn and how did you adjust? — “reflection and insight”
  • A mistake to think you’re going to do something new in a perfect way?
  • Mistake of having too many “high priority” initiatives?
  • How do you create a culture in an organization where learning from mistakes is a reality?
  • Mistake to use too much jargon around continuous improvement?
  • “Strategy alignment” vs “strategy deployment”
  • Mistake to have a large scale initiative (like Lean or Six Sigma) when the CEO isn’t full leading it?
  • Tell us about the podcast

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