Professional Women's Forum

Topic: Bringing Your Company Mission and Values to Life

Does your company have a mission statement?  What about a set of values that you and your employees follow? It is important for a company to have an identity that is defined by one or both of these tools. Just having them written down may not be enough.  Making your mission and values real means making them part of your companies everyday work activities and decision making.

Having the good fortune to work with two companies that have very strong value based cultures; Becky will share her experience with The Ritz-Carlton and North Highland.  You will hear stories about how these companies developed their philosophies and how they work to keep them alive.  You will also have an opportunity to interact with your peers about ideas you can apply in your own company.

Speaker: Becky Tolnay, Consultant, The North Highland Company

Becky is a consultant with North Highland based in Tallahassee, Florida. North Highland is an employee-owned, global consulting firm with 21 local offices in the US as well as the UK and several other countries. The firm combines its core consulting capability with innovative solutions that are relevant to the needs of its clients. North Highland has expertise in business intelligence and analytics, managed services, operating efficiency, people and change, professionalizing it, and strategy. With experience in many different industries they provide a unique blend of experienced know-how and original thinking to deliver great results.

Becky joined North Highland this year after 26 years with The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. She began her career with The Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead in the Accounting office and, for the last 20 years, she has been focused on quality management and continuous improvement holding hotel and regional positions with the Performance Improvement team. As Area Director of Quality, Becky supported nine hotels with analyzing the voice of the customer data to identify top focus areas, facilitating development of improvement strategies with hotel’s senior leadership, providing leadership of hotel’s quality improvement projects to reduce defects, and providing regular scorecards to the regional and hotels’ teams on measures of success related to guest engagement. In her last 5 years with the company Becky supported over 40 improvement projects at 9 hotels with more than half exceeding the goal for the project 1 year after completion. Specific areas of expertise include building cross-functional teams, team facilitation and leadership, process improvement, change management, employee and customer engagement, defect/cost reductions, and strategic planning.