Mary L. Burkhardt, BS, MA, CAS is a Senior Consultant at McArdle Ramerman. She helps clients create strategy and engagement for execution, positioning ever-maturing leaders and team members to win in a highly competitive global marketplace.
Mary is recognized as a performance results leader. She applies innovative solutions, discipline and best practices to significantly improve and sustain performance in business and education. She helps clients make strategy everyone’s job, working with them to leverage and align a wide range of performance assets. These include diversity and culture, methods for simplifying and removing waste in business processes, consolidation of functions for improved efficiency and cost reduction, and the implementation of fast cycles of continuous improvement and strategic renewal for business success.
As an experienced change agent, Mary has led people in small to worldwide organizations to increase their focus on customer delight. They become more accountable, flexible, proactive and productive.
Mary has built performance-based cultures through proactive relationships with customers and suppliers across multiple organizations. She has held a wide range of leadership roles in education, business units, manufacturing and corporate functions including serving for a number of years as a Corporate Vice President in a Fortune 500 Company.
Her executive development includes: Finance and Accounting for Non-Financial Managers, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Leadership in the 21st Century, Kenan Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina; Program for Manufacturing Excellence, Carnegie Mellon University; Statistical Thinking for Managers, Joiner Associates; Communication Skills for Managers, Ridge Associates; Lean Thinking and Simplification, Toyota; Quality Management, Dr. Edward Deming; and Motorola Six Sigma.
Mary wrote the forward to “Why Johnny Still Can’t Read: A New Look at the Scandal of our Schools” by Rudolf Flesch, was published in “Empty Pages: A Search for Writing Competence in School and Society” by Clifton Fadiman and James Howard and in “Changing Focus,” a business review, by Alecia Swasy.
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In her latest blog, Mary Burkhardt suggests that many organizations point the wrong way! Here's what she has to say:
Rethinking how organizations are designed and organization charts are drawn can be a performance success changer. Think about it… most organization charts are drawn as top-down from the board and CEO. The people that customers see most–-bank tellers, cashiers, call center operators and others–-are often at the bottom of the chart.
In this “organization driven” design, no one is looking at the customers...
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In her previous blog, Mary looks at what happens when leadership strengths become a problem. She writes:
Some leaders appear to have a belief in meetings that approaches magical thinking. They seem to think that meetings are critical to the goals intrinsic to every organization: serve customer needs, realize a significant increase in team results and reach specific goals.
Yet, some questions come to mind: Through meetings, do employees actively take ownership of their work and accountability for running their part of the business? Do results hit and exceed stated goals?
It’s been my experience that it’s not unusual for employees to be simply told what to do, and even very reasonable goals can be left unmet.
I believe that an intentional leader can change all of this employee disengagement and disappointing results by simply stopping meetings. There’s a better way.
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