Kevin Burns

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Workplace Expert - Management Consultant - Keynote Speaker Expert

Kevin Burns Quick Facts

Main Areas:Attitude, Employee Engagement, Leadership, Excellence, Service, Safety, Accountability
Career Focus:Workplace Expert - Consultant - Speaker
Affiliation:BGi Consultants
-based consulting organization. We offer strategic expertise in three specific areas: Human Resources and Recruitment, Middle-Management/Front-line Supervisors and also in the development of building Cultures around Corporate Safety. Our choice to excel in these three areas is based on recurring problems we see in many organizations - organizations who are not prepared to wait for the "right" employee and instead settle for the "right now" employee. Organizations that have no strategic plan in how they hire and manage people will always find themselves scrambling to fill holes in their workforce. Instead, we believe that organizations must begin to look to a different model of attracting and managing workers. And here is an overview of the strategic direction that we offer to our clients: 1. Employee Effectiveness - is beyond simple Employee Engagement. Getting employees to engage on their tasks is easy. Making them become effective at their tasks takes a whole different set of skills and really, do you hire employees to be simply mentally present or results-based effective? It's the results of the job that matter far more than how well they stayed engaged while they did the job. Engagement of an employee is a matter of opinion. What appears to be disengagement by one might seem as creative pursuits to problem solving by another. Employee levels of engagement are in direct proportion to how their immediate manager engages them. No, we believe that it is the effectiveness of the employee that matters more. 2. Relevant Management - Research shows that, on average, a manager only actually manages employees 8 hours out of a 40-hour week. The rest is spent in meetings, putting out fires and handling personnel issues. You don't want busy managers wasting time on useless things that don't improve productivity. You want relevant managers, doing relevant tasks that get relevant results. People-work, not paperwork. Irrelevant managers keep busy doing unimportant things. Many of a manager's irrelevant tasks could be delegated. There will always be managers who want to get paid for the hard parts of management work without actually doing them. Offering feedback is one of those hard parts. One of the key components in making employees more effective is management feedback - often - daily if possible. A single golf-lesson annually won't make you a pro. In the same way, an annual performance review is ineffective. To build effectiveness requires regular feedback. Being available for employees and mentoring them and coaching them is relevant management. 3. Collaborative Safety - Collaboration builds teams organically: teams who watch out for each other, support each other and care about each other. The top-down "compliance" philosophy of safety, which many organizations employ, is out-dated because it dictates that employees aren't smart enough to look after each other and therefore, must have a set of rules, procedures and processes to comply with. That may be because these organizations are hiring the wrong people. However, Collaborative Safety ensures employees have each others' backs and builds a peer-based strategy of collectively avoiding danger and unnecessary risk. A safe workplace is a happy and productive workplace that easily attracts other high-performers

Favorite Quotes & Thoughts from Kevin Burns

There are people in every organization who are just looking for an opportunity to be offended. So at 9:00 tomorrow morning, walk up to their desk and offend them. Now they can actually be productive for a change.

If it takes a village to raise a child, how then do you explain the village idiot?

The things that happen today prepare you for what is coming tomorrow. That is called "the process." Trust it.

It’s not that people want us to fail; it’s just that they don’t want us to succeed. When we succeed, we show them what could have been done with a little effort.

When all else fails, there’s always success. Go ahead. Make mistakes. Get over it.

At the end of life, I’ve never heard anyone say, “I wish I’d been less successful and more stupid.” Get better. Get smarter. Learn as much as you can. Do as much as humanly possible.

The trick to consistently thinking outside of the box is to never get in the box in the first place.

People hire us for our skill and then fire us for the crap we bring with it.

With every bad job, bad relationship and bad event in our lives, there is only one common denominator. Figure it out and you’ll be free.

Life is like a hockey game: there are those who play and there are those who pay to watch those who play. Then there are those who show up late and ask, “What did I miss?”

We’re not resistant to change: just sudden change.

A routine is one step away from a rut.

Leadership is not a title or a position. It is a way of life and an attitude.

Getting Started With Kevin Burns

International Attitude Expert Kevin Burns is a masterful communicator. He knows how to get your attention, how to keep it and how to get you to make profound changes in a short period of time. And if you don’t start making changes after your time with Kevin, well ... then you don’t want to!