Process improvement

Learn from Leaders who Fail as well as from Leaders who Succeed

04 Aug
by Bridget DiCello

If you wish to become a more effective leader within your organization, it makes a lot of sense to study great leaders, read what they write and what others write about them and talk to them if you can get the opportunity.

However, it also makes sense to study and talk to the leaders who have tried and failed, and to successful leaders about their failures.  It’s powerful to learn from mistakes others make, especially from those who have been in positions of leadership, stressful situations and under great pressure.

Ask them to share with you not only what not to do and but learn also what to do instead.  It’s very difficult for anyone to focus only on what not to do.  It’s important you gain from these leaders what they would do again if they had the chance to do it over again – hindsight is a powerful 20-20 view.

David Burkus has a great story on his blog about the power of studying failure – by looking at the bullet holes in an aircraft.

To learn from a leader’s experiences, Ask Questions.  Just because a leader’s approach was successful in their situation, their advice may be hard to apply to your world.  Dive into their decision making processes as well.  Ask how they decided to take the path they took in their particular situation to become successful in it.

A successful leader probably doesn’t realize all the good things they did, just the more obvious or those about which they are most proud.  The more questions you can ask about situations where they were successful, and the more you can get them talking, the more knowledge you can glean beyond the things they would tell you if they only summarized their lessons.

These suggestions assume that you can have a one-on-one conversation with these leaders.  That is the environment where the best lessons are learned.  Because most of us cannot call Bill Gates and make a lunch date, you need to think of the leaders you know and ask for a bit of their time.  If you are prepared with intelligent questions, that you send them prior to the meeting, many leaders will be happy to share their insights and wisdom.

What insights have you learned from your failures?

Your Nemesis & the Battle Plan

08 Jul
by Bridget DiCello

Your Nemesis – that one thing in your business that continually haunts you and inhibits your success. Identify it and Battle it.

Maybe this situation describes where you are right now: You are experiencing success. You have a good team. You have a plan to get better, to grow, to expand and to reach 2011 goals. But something is holding you back from the greatness you could achieve. Although you can picture even more success, it seems to be just out of reach.

Maybe just when things are good, you have turnover in your team and that slows you down.  Maybe when sales are being closed left and right, you lose a large existing customer and the back door seems as open as the front door. Maybe although your employees do a good job, there are just enough errors to make the fire-fighting a significant part of your week. Maybe your employees do what you ask, but don’t seize opportunities they see and add to the potential of the team. Maybe everyone does a good job, but there is tension between key managers or key employees. Maybe… The list could go on.

What is it for you that keeps you from achieving an even greater level of success that you know you could or that your boss is demanding that you do?

What to do? Identify your Nemesis and Correct it.

Identify Your Nemesis. Finish this sentence: “In an ideal world, we would…” At some point we all let mediocrity take over. Even successful companies rest on their laurels in certain areas or at a certain point in their success. Reach back to what you really want to accomplish and determine what is in your way to achieving that.

Then summarize your quality issues, fires fought, frustrations for you as a leader, expectations not met and customer complaints in the first half of the year. Pinpoint common themes and the root causes behind them. What is the problem or challenge that repeatedly comes up? What is your Nemesis?

Correct it. If this problem or issue was easy to correct, you would have done it already, it wouldn’t be recurring and it wouldn’t be your Nemesis.

How to correct a Nemesis? You’ve got to come up with a battle plan. If you want to win against your enemy in battle, try these tactics:

Know your enemy better than they know themselves. A quick look at a recurring problem and an easy solution is not the answer to address something that recurs consistently. Your Nemesis will only be addressed if you really understand it. What is the problem? What is the root cause? How is it affecting us? When does it occur? What have we done to try to correct it? What are best practices in our industry? Why does it occur? How does each person contribute?

Arm yourself with the right weapons. When you know the enemy/problem well, you learn how it fights, what makes it occur and you must identify how to attack it with what it won’t expect. This may mean your managers need new and different tools in their leadership tool box, new technologies or software, or good old fashioned face time with customers, vendors, colleagues or employees.

Attack with the element of surprise and destroy the enemy’s will to fight. In business, this means that you can’t just try the same old approaches and expect they will fix a long term problem. You might need to do something a little crazy. Although it’s hard to “destroy the will” of a turnover problem, the other side of that is your team being committed enough to fixing the problem that they stay focused and committed. When you are successful, the risk is that your team will tell you, “We’re successful. We are doing great. Why upset the applecart by addressing this issue – it’s just part of doing business in our industry. It’s always been that way. Our competitors face the same issue.” And on and on. A true Nemesis takes a lot of courage to fight because it’s a long term problem that may be seen as acceptable.

Fight on the terrain where you are strongest. In the Bible, the Israelites win a battle with foot soldiers against chariots because they are in a valley deep with mud. Use your strengths and your team’s talents and abilities to engage the problem.

You and your team can accomplish greatness! What is standing in your way? Identify your Nemesis and work diligently to correct it.

Can you not see the forest for the trees? A true Nemesis in your business is not easily discovered or corrected. Sometimes it requires a set of eyes from the outside. Someone outside your company can often lead you through the analysis and resolution of a long term, recurring problem. Contact Bridget if you’d like to talk about setting up a company meeting or team retreat to take your company to the next level.

Top 10 Productivity Tips – A Focused Mind

16 Jun
by Bridget DiCello

With summer officially ready to start next week, have you finished your spring cleaning?  Spring cleaning is not only about pulling out the cleaning products and getting rid of clutter.  These practices are great and can clear your workspace and make you more productive.  However, productivity also comes from a clear head which allows you to be focused and efficient.

Top 10 Productivity Tips – Try them and see if you ‘spring’ forward:

1.  Make the right decision every moment of every day. This is my definition of good time management.  It’s a realization that we make many decisions every day of how to spend our time, whether planned or unplanned.  The more we can make those decisions consciously, according to clear goals, the more productive we will be.  Most people welcome distractions to some extent – as a relief from something stressful, difficult or unpleasant.  Act very purposefully in each moment of the day and pinpoint those times you tend to make decisions to do things not in line with your goals, however small.

2.  Revisit your goals. Dust them off.  Clean them up – do the reality check and adjust the ones that are unrealistic, get excited again about ones that might be a stretch but that you are passionate about, tweak others given your knowledge of the year so far.   And if you never did write them down, do it now.

3.  Identify what must be done this month, this week and today/tomorrow to achieve your goals. One of the best ways to be productive and make the best use of your time is to be focused and plan.  I’m not talking about the strategic five year plan.  I’m talking about knowing the 3-5 non-routine things that you want to accomplish this month to ensure you are further ahead and closer to your goals than when you started the month.  Then, decide what 2-3 things you need to do this week to make that happen.  Then look at your plan for today or tomorrow and decide what 1-3 things you need to do in those 24 hours to move forward on the week’s goals.

4.  Know your Best Time of Day. We all have a time of day where we are most productive.  Are you a morning person?  A night owl?  You only really wake up at noon?  Observe your productivity and effectiveness.  What time of day are you at your best?  When you determine when that is, schedule your most important activities at that time.  Avoid doing trivial tasks or putting out fires during that time.

5.  Schedule your day, week and month. Very few of us have schedules that never get interrupted or rearranged.  But, that is not a reason not to plan at all.  Plot out your month, schedule your week and map out your day.  Leave some “Wing it” time to fit in the little things that pop up.  Schedule a block of time to do the emails, phone calls, etc. that fill your day if you are not careful.  When at the end of the day you have not done everything you wanted to because of fires and interruptions, immediately reschedule the activities that you didn’t do for tomorrow or later in the week.

6.  Get rid of the Things to Do List. They haunt most of us.  Instead of putting something on the list, simply schedule it somewhere in your day or week.  If you cannot find anywhere to put it, that means it is really not important enough to you to get done, so don’t torture yourself with leaving it to haunt you on a list.  You may want to keep a “To Do Someday” List for those things that are great ideas, but are just not a priority right now.  Then, put it away and only look at it periodically.

7.  Schedule appointments to talk. If you plan to meet with another person and have a conversation, do it purposefully.  If you just ‘stop by’ their office or give them a call without a plan, you may end up wasting both of your time.  And they may do the same with you.  If you need to talk to them, plan a time and day and have an “agenda”.  More thoughts on that next week…

8.  Do a time log. After you have planned your month, week and day, and taken all the things to do list items and scheduled them somewhere, for just a few days – record what you actually did.  Compare your reality to your plan.  Maybe you need to adjust how you do what you do, become more effective, learn to say no, or delegate more.  Unless you have a good picture of what you are actually doing, it’s hard to have a basis for productive change.   And no, you really don’t know what you spend your time doing until you log it.  Try it and you’ll see!

9.  Stop Procrastinating. Many managers and leaders are procrastinators.  I never believed that about myself until I understood the connection between procrastinating and being a perfectionist.  For the perfectionist, it is rarely ever the right time or there is not enough time to do it right so, “Why do it?”  Not to say that perfectionists are not productive, just that certain things that are new, different or particularly important get put off for the more immediate, urgent and familiar tasks at which they can more easily succeed.

10.  Keep track of information. You may mistake being able to do a lot with being organized.  It’s amazing how much time we spend looking for something, finding information twice, having a conversation or part of it a second time, or sorting through the volumes of information we use to run our business.  Review your systems for collecting, sorting and using information in your business and to develop your team members.  Do they effectively support your mission or do they slow you down?

Comment here or join in our LinkedIn Discussion.

Decision Making – On Autopilot or On the Case?

31 May
by Bridget DiCello
We’ve all seen the steps to decision making:
1.      Identify the objective
2.      Define the situation
3.      Generate alternatives
4.      Gather information
5.      Weigh the pros and cons of each
6.      Develop an action plan
7.      Implement
8.      Evaluate the results

How many decisions did you make in this way in the past week?  Who in the world has time to? But, if we don’t how can we get out of a routine that may be unproductive?

We run into two main types of decisions that I believe we solve with two distinct solutions:  Intuitive Solutions and Investigative Solutions

Intuitive Solutions: This is where experience counts, and a good memory, attention to detail and ability to pick up cues and logical patterns is important.  These are problems, issues and situations where we really want to call on the experts in the business, the key employees who have been through it all, and the person who loves their job and knows all the ins and outs.  These situations cause us to say, “We must have faced situations like this before, what have we done in the past?”

Those people who are valuable resources run through past situations in their heads, compare them to this present dilemma, choose the best course of action and share it with the team to implement.  The decision is made quickly about how to proceed.  If the proper people with experience are consulted, there is rarely an error in carrying out this decision.

Do you have these people in your organization? Those who have the experience to be a great resource and can be trusted without weighing all the alternatives in a lengthy process?

What do you do to develop more of this ability in your team? These people are developed when after decision is made, a problem is solved or a situation is handled, there is routinely a debrief, an autopsy if you will, to look at what happened, what was decided and the success or failure experienced.  The lessons learned will enable those with the ability to learn the patterns that work.  This ability must be practiced and consciously developed especially because you don’t want to wait years for someone to develop it, and often turnover rates are high enough that something takes a good employee away before they fully develop.

Investigative Solutions: This is where those decision-making steps above make sense.  This decision steps into unfamiliar territory, requires the input of many experts, and is complicated to the point that past experience is helpful but must be pieced together in order to be most useful.

Do you have people who are good at this process in your organization? These need to be individuals who have the patience to work through the process, yet not someone who gets so bogged down in detail that it takes forever to come to a decision.

What do you do to develop more of this ability in your team? Even though you won’t need them to use this long process every day or even every week, the ability to move through the process is a mental exercise that can be applied to overall logical thought processing.  So, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to spend some time next time you need an investigative solution to work through it as a team, and systematically map it out in order to help them to understand this process and make it second nature.

What occurs most often on your team?  What “type” of decision makers are in your organization?

New Beginnings

12 May
by Bridget DiCello

I guess it’s only natural to start thinking about new beginnings in business when one has a baby!  Typically, I see business owners and managers fall somewhere in between constant newness and staleness in their business.

Are you the type of owner or manager who needs newness just for the sake of newness?  Are you trying new ideas, strategies and processes because they are exciting but don’t check if they are needed?  If you are, you might spend unnecessary dollars, experience limited return on your investment and use a lot of employee energy for limited success.

Or are you the type of owner or manager who believes that if it isn’t broke, we should not spend our time trying to fix it? If you are, your processes, systems and strategies may get a bit stale and work, but fall short of their potential.

Is there a happy medium? I think there is and it is found in the answers to these two questions:

1.       What is it that we are trying to achieve?  What does our vision of a successful company look like?  What do we want to be known for?  How do we want to do business (our values)?

2.      What do our metrics tell us about how well we are achieving our desired vision, results and values with how we currently do things?

Any exciting new idea should be tested with, “What do we hope to achieve with this change?” and “What is the probability that the benefits will occur?” and “What resources will be needed to test and implement this new idea?”  In other words, what are the good reasons to implement this change, and how do they weigh against the costs and probability of success?

Every process, especially when there is a problem or issue, should be met with, “Do we need to revisit this process overall?” and “What do our metrics tell us about how well we are doing?” and “When’s the last time we looked critically at how we run this process?”  If the issue is an anomaly, there is no reason to spend time analyzing the whole process, but if the issue is in fact a warning sign of a larger problem, it is time to revisit the process before it crashes.

What is something new and exciting that you decided to implement?  How did you make the decision to put energy in that area?  Do you have a process that needs to be revamped that you are avoiding?

 

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