Less Academic. More Pragmatic.
I could share my top 5 strengths. Throw around big words related to operational excellence and professional development. Even provide you a list of academic degrees and credentials.
But I’m a realist. None of those will help you decide whether to book time to talk. You’re most likely wondering if I can help you address the business challenges keeping you up at night.
I won’t know until we talk. What I can promise is that my life experiences and personal style enable me to:
1. Move across and learn new industries
Growing up on a farm, I learned to assess and find practical solutions to problems. While earning money peeling popple logs for the paper mills as a youth, I came to further appreciate the value of a hard day’s work. I even forced myself to be uncomfortable when learning to skydive and working as a scuba diver.
Why tell you this? Because success in each role required me to ask the right questions, get up to speed quickly and jump right in. And these are the traits I continue to bring to every engagement, whether plastics extrusion, millworks, pharmaceutical manufacturing or your industry.
2. Establish camaraderie and trust quickly
When we go on walks, my family gets frustrated with me. While they would prefer to keep to themselves, I love to get a conversation going with a stranger who happens to be passing by.
I bring this passion of finding common ground with people I don’t know to the teams or groups I work with. It allows me to gain people’s trust at almost warp speed (as others have described it) and get them to openly discuss what’s “really” going on.
3. Draw connections between seemingly unrelated things
One of the largest hurdles in getting people to adopt a process or embrace development is getting them to understand what’s being said. To do that, I often draw parallels between a topic and something outside of work.
Drawing parallels is largely how I developed Contracted Leadership’s Six-Step Problem Solving and Development Framework. There’s tremendous opportunity for growth when these two areas are combined. Certain skills are taught at each step of the process. And when one learns by doing, the knowledge sticks.
It’s a lot like the old fishing proverb. We can give a team a “fish” and they’ll solve the problem that day. Or we can teach the team to “fish.” And they’ll solve problems and improve results for a lifetime.
-Bruce Holoubek, President and Co-Founder of Contracted Leadership
Bruce is gifted at being able to quickly see logical improvements to operations and rallying a team to implement those improvements.
Bruce was a game changer. I was on the verge of leaving the organization. He challenged me and helped me understand my strengths and how to leverage them.
Bruce quickly understood our processes and built rapport with the team to identify and implement improvements.