Category Archives: Functional Skills

Meetings – where you begin to be a more effective manager

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A recent New York Times article “Building a Better Teacher” by Elizabeth Green ((March 2, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html)) told the story of Doug Lemov’s discovery that a large component of high performing teachers’ success came from their classroom management skills. While reading the article, and, especially watching the videos of teachers actually employing good class management, I was struck by an interesting parallel in the management world. Just as education schools do not do a good job of preparing teachers to know what to do when they first walk into a classroom, most managers learn their craft by trial and error. They have little help from mentoring or development programs in their companies. And, business schools seem to provide little guidance either.

Meeting management is to effective managers as classroom management is to successful teachers

Meetings are a great place to start to learn the management craft and a crucial platform for driving and sustaining high performance. Great managers and great organizations have great meetings. And, from the perspective of a manager interested in developing a high performance culture, meetings are a great starting point in building a high performance company. After all, meetings exhibit all of the important attributes of high performance organization and culture. And, no effective manager can be ineffective in meetings.

Good meetings:

  • focus on results ($s, people and values)
  • engage, empower and demand every participant’s energies
  • use fact-based thinking
  • orient to customer needs (internal and external)
  • devolve strategy into tactics
  • employ process and systems thinking
  • use well-developed problem solving tools and approaches
  • focus on adding value for customers (internal and external)
  • look for waste reduction
  • build on company and individual strengths
  • among the more important……

Meetings are a great place to start because they are a regular event in which the manager has significant control and can demonstrate, concretely, high performance principles and practices in front of, and with their direct reports.


Planes Change. Values Don’t – No Sloganeering

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Plane change. Values don't United Airlines

Recently I was on an commercial air flight and was greeted by a bit of corporate sloganeering that accompanied by meal (yes, you guessed correctly that I was on an international flight). The napkin shouted out in bold blue text, “Planes change. Values don’t. Your priorities will always be ours.” Continue reading →

More on Why Business Plans Fail – financial planning -part three

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In the two earlier postings on key causes for business plans to fail, we took note of the lack of a vigorous implementation process and poor understanding of the customer value proposition and market environments. 

A third significant cause is poor financial planning. Entrepreneurs fail to plan six basic financial elements: Continue reading →

More on Why Business Plans Fail – part two – the connection to customers

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In the preceding post about key causes for business plans to fail, we discussed the lack of a robust process to convert strategy into tactics, to convert the plans into the day-to-day work of the organization. This posting will take up another major failure mode. That is the failure to have a compelling customer perceived value proposition and the corollary failures to understand markets and customers more generally. Continue reading →

The Most Significant Reason Business Plans Fail

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The failure rate in bringing business plans to fruition is very high. Many observers, including me, have found a number of common failure modes. First among all are the shortcomings in the planning and execution processes themselves. The failure to actually put the plan into action

A good planning process engages all of the significant stakeholders in the creation of the plan. This practice is productive because 90% or more of the facts required to create the plan are sitting in the room when all of the stakeholders are there. Creating the plan through a team effort leverages this knowledge, provides opportunities for problems and opportunities to surface and be resolved, and the resulting plan is inherently owned by everyone because they were present and involved in its creation.

A good planning process insists on ruthlessly testing every assumption. It is a common practice to conduct sessions with no holds bared brainstorming and critiques. This is most essential when planning for a transformation strategy for a mature business. Business leaders find it extremely difficult to prune away the past even when it has no future. Past successes seductively appear to forecast future success.

By far the most significant cause of failure for business plans is the inability of the management to translate the plan effectively into day to day work. Most business plans fall far short of the detailed work required to decompose strategies into tactics. No where do the list of tasks, properly sequenced, appear with clear delineation of responsibility, authority, deliverables, budgets and resources and deadlines. And, finally, there is no clear communications and feedback plan so that those in frontline positions know what to do, why, when, and what are the expected results.

More about why business plans fail over the next four postings

Manage Your Business As Processes

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Many business owners and managers are frustrated by the poor results achieved by some portion of their business. They diligently track their business using metrics like sales, profits, customer perceived quality, on time delivery, etc. These are obviously some of the most important results any business needs to produce. Why doesn’t attention to these important metrics produce better results?
Unfortunately none of these metrics are actionable nor controllable as objects of management focus. No amount of teeth gnashing about inadequate sales will generate a single additional sale. No matter how intensely you beat on your operations to improve on time delivery will this lead to improvement.  
 
Why is this so? 
 
Let’s examine on time delivery as an example of the problem. On time delivery is an end result of a process, a series of ordered steps, activities, that are your production operation. This process may not be delivering adequate on time delivery to your customers. But, you cannot understand what is causing this process to be out of control without examining in detail, through what is commonly referred to as root cause analysis, the causes of this failure. Here is a brief list of some of the more common causes: 

  • Part shortages  
  • Machine down time for poor maintenance  
  • Production bottlenecks  
  • Poor part quality  
  • Lack of labor  
  • Poorly trained labor  
  • Poor scheduling  
  • Inadequate customer requirements specifications

 
The lesson here is that in order to improve on time delivery you really need to first determine the cause, second set improvement tasks that eliminate the cause, and third measure improvements in that function until you achieve a controlled state of adequate  
performance for on time delivery. 
 
The fundamental mind set is to see your business as a system of processes. Your task is to make sure the processes are well defined and operate in a controlled state to produce the desired results. The method for achieving in control processes is to determine the root causes of failure, set tasks to eliminate the cause, and track metrics that measure the reduction of the causative element.  
 
Now you might be in a service business and say to yourself, “My business does not produce widgets. How can this apply to me?” 
 
Services are also produced through a series steps. In many cases these steps are not well-defined and are further complicated by the frequent direct interface with, and frequently the participation of, the customer. It is not as easy to “see” the steps in services production as in widget production. You don’t have the machines and parts moving around with a sequence of physical transformations.  
 
Here is a list of typical causes of poor service quality: 

  • Bad service design  
  • Mis-managed customer expectations  
  • Inadequate information resources in the hands of the frontline service provider  
  • Poor training of the service provider  
  • Unclear decision making scope and authority for the service provider

 
Learn to see your business from a process perspective. Then, apply process control techniques to drive to better results in sales, profits, customer retention, and whatever else is important.