Meet Chris Aarons
"Training up-levels your people. It up-levels your skills, it up-levels your managers to do more, better, faster, greater and build a culture that allows you to do it again and again and again."
Chris Aarons is the founder and principal of Chris Aarons Strategy and Marketing. Using a unique mix of communications, digital, sales and marketing strategies, he has delivered results far beyond the sum of their parts for brands such as Adobe, Amazon, AMD, Cisco, Dell, HP, LG, Microsoft and others.
A Passion For Improvement
Aarons also lectures on communication, marketing and social media topics for the Center for Professional Education and the McCombs School of Business. Aarons has also written two books on social media and digital marketing, with his second book, The Digital Helix, becoming a Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestseller.
As a business and marketing expert who builds custom programs for Extended Campus, Aarons works to provide our clients and their staff with updated skills and an expanded toolkit. His focus is on helping teams become the best version possible because an organization can't improve unless each team improves. With the changes organizations have faced over the last several years, he often focuses on the following areas of improvement:
Building Teams
Aarons has been helping his clients build teams and grow their organizations for over 30 years. Aarons has studied what makes the best companies perform well and what makes others fail, or why they don't achieve success. Key skills he suggests teams pursue:
- Managing without authority
- Problem-solving
- Decision-making
- Critical thinking
"Those are the most popular, most important skills that people get hired for. And when you don't have those, the organization really languishes and struggles."
Manager Success
More has changed in the last three years than the preceding ten, which means the way people were managed in 2018 doesn't work today, especially considering virtual and/or hybrid teams.
Aarons recommends training managers to meet the growing needs of the company and its staff and encouraging a learning, growing, knowledge-based culture.
This starts from the top down. When leadership builds a culture that values training, it has a reverberating effect: the team that took the training improves, and then the teams they impact improve, and soon people who didn't even attend the training are reaping the benefits. Managers at all levels benefit from this mindset.
Employee Retention
The way employees think about their jobs has changed, which means managers have to change their approach or workplaces become very chaotic. Employees demand best practices and the right kind of tools and training in place so they can excel. Without these processes in place, organizations experience problems with employee retention and productivity and face overall organizational issues.
Employees also need a solid work environment that feels psychologically safe. The lack of a psychologically safe space at work is the number one reason that people leave organizations, according to Aarons. If organizations don't invest in becoming the best version of themselves, they lose good people and retain the people they wish they didn't have in the first place.
Communication
Organizations have to communicate with their staff effectively, especially in times of unsettling change. "When change happens so dynamically and at such velocity that nobody's even had a chance to digest it, and then another change occurs, it makes everyone unsettled," explains Aarons. Employees need coping mechanisms to deal with this ongoing, sea-shifting environment.
"One thing I tell my students and clients is that if you want to be successful, you've got to be very good at being uncomfortable." But if organizations are asking their employees to feel good about being uncomfortable, the employees are going to need clear communication about expectations and plans for the future.
Engage Aarons to Train Your Team
If Aarons' specialties line up with key skills that your team needs to build, contact the Extended Campus Custom Training team to explore the custom training options available to you.
Not Ready for Custom Training?
Aarons teaches multiple classes for programs across campus. You may find that one of his existing courses meets your needs! Explore options on the Center for Professional Education and the Texas Executive Education websites.
