Do you have the tools you need?
Running a successful business requires the three aspects, mindset, skillset, toolset, to be working in alignment.
You have to believe in yourself, your team and your activities for the company to reach it’s potential. You must have the personal skills to manage the various people and processes around you, whilst performing your own role expertly. These two traits are predominantly down to you, making them more controllable. However, your toolset represents the conditions and resources at your disposal and will need a wider, more complex focus to master.
Don’t feel daunted. Although, improving your people, processes and systems can seem insurmountable, you don’t have to do it all at once.
A limiting mindset – Anyone will do
If you’re aiming to begin this programme of improvement now, the first step is to work out who your ideal employee is. What skills do they have? What attributes do they possess? Do their values align with the wider values of your company?
Onboarding people without due diligence is unproductive. It will take longer to get them up to speed for their role, they will require more ongoing support and may even clash with the other personalities in your team. Giving everyone a chance might seem like the fairest thing to do, but conducting this early filtering is far more likely to benefit you and them, so you’re getting the results you desire and they feel at home in your organisational culture.
If you’re missing a role in your business, consider your options. Should you bring in someone new, or should you promote from within? Choosing the second approach will demonstrate to your staff that your company offers progression opportunities and might contribute to retaining more staff. However, this might not be an option if no one has the skills you need.
Whether you hire or promote, having training & development courses in place is always a good thing. Encourage your colleagues to broaden their knowledge, so your workforce is continually evolving and developing to keep pace with your market. Reinvesting in your staff is not a luxury but a necessity, if you are going to reach your potential as a company.
A missing element – Efficiency
Now you’ve got the right people on board, who are qualified and eager to participate, you must make sure the jobs they carry out are efficient.
To achieve efficiency, a process must be:
1) Productive: Deliver the output that you want.
2) Lean: Streamline the resources involved, whether this is time, money, or effort.
3) Understood: Document the way you would like it performed so everyone knows what’s expected.
There isn’t a uniform approach to improving your processes. Not only does each sector do things in a different way, but every business will differ too. What you need is a regular and standardised method of reviewing your current processes to make sure they are still relevant, effective, and future fit.
Continual iteration (the marginal gains approach) is always preferable and easier for others to adopt than a more dramatic transformation process. However, the latter option might occasionally be the best if there has been a major change in your market, or in your customer needs.
As a leader, you will know if things aren’t running right, if you’re on top of the data and if you check-up regularly with the relevant people. It’s your role to challenge the status quo not just maintain it, because it’s convenient and familiar.
A different perspective - …and bring it all together
The best people and processes are useless if they don’t knit together.
Hopefully you will have hired and trained your staff, so they are well-suited to their jobs, but running a successfully business is a team game and you need everyone’s efforts to be unified. The key to attaining this is having systems in place that ease communication, whilst prioritise collaborative work.
This normally means integrated digital systems, such as cloud storage for sharing resources or a dashboard that gives updates on tasks and their progress. Computer based or not, the fundamental part of an effective system is that it becomes routine, so it’s familiar to everyone. Consequently, if the production team need to send over an invoice to the finance team, they are using a system that both know well. This means that despite their functions being disparate, they are speaking the same language.
Choosing the correct systems can be time-consuming, as each party will have different ideas about what they want. However, I would strongly advise you consider your choices carefully; many businesses are stunted by internal people and processes that are pulling in separate directions.
Whilst developing your mindset and skillset was your responsibility, I would recommend sharing this larger task of improving your organisation toolset with your colleagues. One of your primary accountabilities as a leader is to ensure your company is getting better and not just bigger, to ultimately increase profitability and sustainability.
Where do you need to improve your toolset right now?