StrategyTag Archive -

The Employee Junk Drawer

June 23, 2010 in Uncategorized with 0 Comments

Everyone on your team can be and should be strategic to your organizational objectives. Period.
After meeting with a few of our key people and members of our Client Experience Team (they’re much more important than simply calling them “admin”), I’m finding schedules and activities full of good, well meaning stuff but missing the mark strategically in their roles.
 
5 quick things:
  • Much of the stuff on your to be delegated to someone else list should simply go away. Don’t push your garbage to someone else on your team.
  • Make sure everyone on your team understands the answers to these 3 questions:

1. What is our organization trying to accomplish?

2. What are the top 3 components of my role that best moves our organization to its goals?

3. What’s on my plate now that doesn’t have any effect on these top 3 components?

  • Most people on your team will need help in knowing what to stop doing and pruning their activities. Schedule a meeting with your team members to review their top 10 tasks and bring out the hatchet.
  • Sometimes the boss or owner is the biggest problem. People tend to “drop everything” when the owner speaks, your managers/owners may need some coaching on how they communicate their needs. (Yep, tread carefully…)
  • Good employees are artists at keeping (or looking) busy. Pull the plug, chop the list, and refocus the bullseye.

The Employee Junk Drawer: Busy activities that seem to be important, often delegated by others, but simply cause drag to your organization.

"I Want to Move Dirt"

March 5, 2010 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments

A friend of mine Bobby McGee posed a question to me that I thought I’d respond to and wonder how would you answer this question?

“A boulder is at the top of a mountain and contains a million dollars for your business… get to the bottom of the mountain and the million dollars is yours…. Would you push the boulder or dig out in front of it? Why?”

While the analogy lends to some interpretation, here is my response:
  • Have truly great people on your team. If I picked the five best people from our company of 58, I think we could open a donut shop (and scores of other businesses) and be successful. Great people don’t need to be pushed, they roll on their own as they are strategic, self-motivated, and they value team. (Jim Collins… get the right people on the bus) So what helps them roll?

  • Remove the dirt (or barriers) that are in front of your great people. One of the most important roles I have is to remove hurdles that slow our great people. This may be team communication, communication to clients, poor processes or no processes, or misinformation in key measurables. So what other dirt is in our way?
  • Remove the dirt in our own lives. We all have some sort of dysfunction or distraction that can keep us stuck where we are… Fear of failure, fear of change, moral failures, inability to trust others, glass half empty mentality, lack of financial discipline, etc… Working on our own individual “issues” can help dislodge the dirt in our lives. What can happen then?

We put ourselves in a position to roll toward our God-given purpose, a business can have a great chance of success, and in general, life rocks a little more (uh, pardon the pun…)

Dig out in front of the rock I say…. what say you?