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A coach’s immediate strategy is grooming their silver medalists to become the gold standard in future Olympics. The same can be said for finding talent to add to your team. Many times the silver medalists (“B” players) are undervalued and passed over while an organization searches for the gold.

Is there one leadership style that is better than the other? Which specific leadership style is best for creating a culture that retains employees? Can one have multiple styles at once? In this column, Nicole Humber shares her perspective, and those of her employees, on effective leadership styles.

How is the adjuster to know if you handled the job like Stan in a Van or a top-shelf company? The answer is documentation. The problem is that too many restorers don’t understand the mechanics of how to put together a good file that properly supports the invoice. They expect the adjuster to simply take their word for it. 

Barry Rice, CSP, reviews successful methods for preventing hand injuries, one of the most common injuries in restoration work. He provides advice on choosing the right glove and glove training implementation.

We find thought leaders in every industry — health care, technology, professional cleaning, facility management and, of course, the restoration industry. But have you ever wondered how these people became “thought leaders”? Here, Robert Kravitz shares the importance of thought leadership along with five common steps in the journey to becoming a thought leader.

“Today’s restoration software helps users estimate and manage recovery projects more efficiently than ever. This new technology is awesome, but the most important thing to remember is all software relies on good data entry, as garbage data in will result in garbage data out,” Thomas McGuire writes.

This practice is very common in many industries. Remember when you booked a plane ticket and were kept in the loop with little to no human interaction about everything from gate changes to check-in reminders to delays? What about the time you scheduled the cable guy to come out for an internet outage, and received automated texts and emails with updates?

“We as an industry only know how to check these moisture content levels and have no insight into controlling or evaluating the primary metrics that are determining the length of time it takes to get these materials back to acceptable levels,” Chuck Dewald III writes. “Our industry is drying completely backward!”

In the age of digitalization, why should risk managers, contractors and insurance professionals pay closer attention to document restoration? What type of work sites or clients require document restoration? What is the technical process to restore documents in a way that these items are later safe to use? The why of document restoration can be divided into three categories: Efficiency, legality and sentimentality, Boris Skoro writes.