From Frustration to Delight: How a Single Mindset Shift Transformed a Customer Experience
From Frustration to Delight: How a Single Mindset Shift Transformed a Customer Experience When Service Turns Silent Not long ago, one of our Skill Bolts clients, a regional healthcare services company, invited me to review their customer-care center. The metrics looked good on paper: average call time down, ticket closures up. But when I asked […]
Beyond Technical: Why Behavioural Skills Are the New Competitive Advantage
Beyond Technical: Why Behavioural Skills Are the New Competitive Advantage The Silent Bottleneck When one of our client organizations, a fast-growing tech company, reached out to Skill Bolts, the leadership team believed they had a “performance issue.” Sprint velocity had slowed, projects were missing deadlines, and meetings were turning into marathon troubleshooting sessions. Yet when […]
Is Your Restructuring Strategy Killing Trust? The Hidden Costs of Quiet Cutting
Is Your Restructuring Strategy Killing Trust? The Hidden Costs of Quiet Cutting In 2025, organizations face a new talent paradox: retain top performers while reducing overhead, without triggering the PR backlash of mass layoffs. The silent solution many are turning to? “Quiet cutting.” This practice subtly reassigning employees to lower-value roles or off-path positions to […]
How One Conversation Changed a Team: 5 Leadership Habits That Turn Compliance Into Commitment
How One Conversation Changed a Team: 5 Leadership Habits That Turn Compliance Into Commitment The Wake-Up Call A few months ago, I wrapped up a leadership development program with one of our Skill Bolts clients, a national engineering firm transitioning to hybrid work. Midway through the program, one of their mid-level managers said something that […]
How to Diagnose and Fix Silos
How to Diagnose and Fix Silos Are All Silos the Same – Diagnose Before You Act ? Silos aren’t just a tech or structure problem—what if they’re psychological? Over the next 4 posts, I’ll break down the 3 hidden types of silos blocking collaboration—and how behavioral science helps us dismantle them. We’ve all seen it: […]
How misaligned goals can kill collaboration
How misaligned goals can kill collaboration Systemic Silos – When Everyone’s Winning, But the Company is Losing : 2/4 Is your team hitting targets… but the business is still bleeding? Let’s talk about the first—and most invisible—type of silo: when misaligned goals quietly kill collaboration. At a large beverage company , the sales team is […]
How to break Elitist and Protectionist Silos
How to break Elitist and Protectionist Silos When Ego or Fear Builds the Strongest Silos In this final part of the Skill Bolts silo series, I’m drawing from both research and real-world experience to explore the two hardest silos to break—Elitist and Protectionist. They’re emotionally charged. And technical solutions alone won’t fix them. At EliteMed […]