December can be kind of a euphoric time, especially when we’ve had a great year that looks to be followed by more of the same. It’s historically a “short” month, with most of the work sandwiched between a wonderful family dinner at Thanksgiving and the eight or ten day long Christmas/New Year holiday week. It is great to be able to relax, and reflect on a good year, especially when you have accomplished so much yourself this past year. Your life is finally looking like you always thought it would before you actually got the top job!
That is, if you have been following my blog for the last several months. If not, there is still enough time left in 2016 to redirect your efforts so that you can spend more time thinking, reflecting, and planning, the truly important work, after you divest yourself of the merely urgent items, or, worse yet, the small “tasky” things that nibble at your time
Either way, now is the time to really push for improvement. Read on and see!
For those of you who have made your own job more Lean, you have created the momentum you needed this past year by rejuvenating yourself and by strengthening the team that supports you, making this the perfect springboard for taking corporate performance to a higher level. What are the next steps to take to grow the company’s performance to new levels?
I am not talking about a sharp turn here. The key is to build on the successes you have created so far, without being tied to a new set of assumptions about where or how far you can yet go.
So what do you do now? Make sure that everyone in the company is aligned with the goals that drive your strategies. When you do, you can achieve up to 30% greater performance, according to the results from the AMA/HRI High-Performance Organization Survey 2007 based on a global survey commissioned by the American Management Association and conducted by the Human Resource Institute in 2007. (Email me for the specifics if you are interested).
Research shows that only a handful of components make up the strategic drivers of most corporations. Where these drivers are understood, and where deliberate efforts are made to align the behaviors and mindsets of everyone in the organization with the strategic drivers, the resulting performance may be breathtaking.
Let’s examine just one such driver to see the impact: growth. What is the role of growth in your firm and how are decisions made that impact that growth? Think of Growth as being a continuum, a line between Profit Growth and Market Share Growth. It doesn’t matter where you are on this line. Wherever you decide to be on this continuum becomes the specific driver for your company. Now, establish a climate that supports your strategy. All of your people need to understand exactly where this strategy falls on the continuum. If Market Share is the driver, you will emphasize sales and marketing efforts, new products, and pricing strategies, tactics that move the organization toward this goal. When the entire organization understands and supports the creation of additional market share, people stop working at cross purposes and begin to collaborate on the mutually understood goal.
Conversely, when Profit Growth is the focus, the company emphasis will be on getting Lean throughout the enterprise, controlling costs, examining every customer return for clues to improvement, or reducing costs of quality. Your people will push the Supply Chain to become Lean as well, reducing administration and transportation costs to sustainable levels in true customer-supplier partnerships.
There are great differences in the processes, mindsets and behaviors of the people who are pursuing Market Share compared to those who are focused on Profit. Engineers devoted to cost reduction can delay new products for more analysis, but if the company is driven to increase market share, the timeliness of the product’s introduction could be derailed, allowing the competition to gain the advantage. Or those responsible for the Supply Chain can inadvertently delay an introduction date if they are still negotiating design changes to reduce costs, again negating the impact of a new product’s introduction. Or a Vendor Planner can be pushing his vendor for air freight delivery while the corporate executives think that everyone is concentrating on holding costs down.
Add up all the things that might happen when competent, diligent people work hard to accomplish the wrong thing. This is where you will find the last 30% of performance!
You must broadcast the strategy relentlessly. You have to make sure that every employee and every process are aligned with the corporate strategies. It will require your personal commitment and vigilance to make this happen, but when you do, you will really understand why I told you in March to start thinking in terms of “unreachable” goals!
Best wishes for a safe and happy New Year as you continue to create your company.
