What Does a Guide Dog Have To Do With Your Workplace?
Stop buying fish and learn how to catch them yourself!
Blue Skies USA uses the unique relationship between our founder and his guide dog to teach you how to:
- Develop current and emerging leaders
- Recruit, interview, hire, and onboard
- Build a real talent pool
- Capture positional knowledge
Hiring the right candidate is your most important task, but recruiters and consultants are too expensive for many small businesses. Blue Skies USA teaches how to locate, interview, hire, onboard, develop, and set your employees up for success without breaking your budget.
NEVER HIRE A RECRUITER OR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANT AGAIN!
How?
To be a successful guide dog user, the handler must do many things, including:
- Build strategic plans constantly throughout the day
- Become aware of inadvertent messages being sent to the dog
- Understand how and what the dog is communicating to the handler
- Develop trust
- Motivate and reward appropriately
- Course correct
- Analyse the environment
- Set the team up for success
- Maintain focus on the objective
- Overcome obstacles
- Avoid crises or lead around them
- Leverage the team’s skills and abilities
- Celebrate the victories
The tools a guide dog handler uses every day to cross busy intersections, take a seat in a crowded restaurant, navigate to Terminal 4 Gate 47A at LAX, or simply take a walk through the neighborhood are the same skills you will use to further develop your workforce.
I was stunned to learn everything… Seriously, EVERYTHING… I was doing to travel safely with my guide dog could also be used to accelerate my business career. As an executive, I relied heavily on the tools I learned as a blind traveler with a guide dog to bring in the right people to our workforce, train the people we already had, develop reward and compensation systems that really worked, strategically roadmap our future endeavors, and so much more. I can’t wait to show you how to do it too!
Richard “Buss” Brauer
When employees leave your organization, what do you do?
- Promote from within?
- Engage in your own external search?
- Hire an expensive recruiter?
The cost to hire a new employee is the equivalent of 6 to 9 months’ worth of the open position’s salary
Example: The Two-Week Notice / “That’s Sort of What I Do”
A mid-level employee earning $60,000 annually turns in her two-week notice. Her manager meets with HR, and it is agreed the exiting employee will commit her final two weeks to documenting all short- and long-run activities. Looking at her job description, she thinks, “Well, that is sort of what I did every day,” then identifies less than half of her day-to-day job duties despite her best efforts to think of everything, before exiting the organization.
The position’s manager, the hiring manager, and HR work together to recruit a new candidate, but they do not fully understand what the position entails and are reluctant to promote from within due to an absence of natural internal fits. The position remains open for 4 months (costing the company about $20,000) and is eventually filled by a new-hire who has to “figure out” his day-to-day responsibilities and is consequently 100 percent reliant on his manager in the first few months of employment.
Our mantra is “Find the Door,” which is the most commonly performed task in a guide dog handler’s life. Organizations and professionals working with Blue Skies USA learn how the communication, leadership, and inclusion techniques a guide dog handler uses to find those doors can be applied to increase their own personal leadership skills and career aspirations.
Blue Skies USA teaches small business clients how to find doors that will ensure they exceed their unique measures of success. We deliver services in formats preferred by our clients, which include:
- One-on-one coaching (in-person or virtual)
- Systematic capture of tribal and positional knowledge
- Team-building events
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that people love*
- In-Person and virtual presentations / “Lunch & Learns”
- Executive retreats
*No amount of DEI training or policy will make your workplace culture more inclusive. It is time to put what you know, and what you don’t, into actions that better serve the entirety of the human workforce.
Know what door to look for, find it efficiently, and have the courage to walk through it! Then, go find the next one.
Richard “Buss” Brauer, Blue Skies USA
Past, Present, and Future, it is a Pleasure To Work With You!
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There is no fee for your team’s first live webinar and there is no better, practical or more fun leadership diversity, equity, and inclusion training than “Find the Door,” which is delivered by an executive who is blind and his guide dog. Ask any question, learn how a blind person’s travel skills can help accelerate your career, and find out how you too can “Find the Door” to a corporate culture where DEI is fun, profitable, and embraced by all.
For info about Blue Skies USA, please visit our FAQ blog.