Are Your Clients High Effort Or High Reward?
August 3, 2018
Want to know what to fix in your Biz? Think of it like a Theatre.
August 18, 2018
Every now and again a leadership team gets a shock why don’t deliver the results they want to, either quarterly or monthly.
This could be you.
If you respond well to this news, you won’t only fix the problem, but you’ll fix things in the organisation that lead to success not just in the next quarter or month, but success in the next year and in the long term.
If you get this wrong you might make a superficial play and fix something that makes no substantial difference, and the problem re-arises in the future.
What I’m teaching is a framework and a way of thinking about how to fix this problem for good so that your results rebound permanently.
So for many of you, you’ve got a goal in mind as a team.
Most of the leadership teams I work with have a three-year vision. What’s associated with that is usually dollars (revenue and profit) and a bunch of other indicators of success. Every year we’ve got 12 month goals that we want to get to. So there’s that goal. But there’s ALSO the goals that your stakeholders keep you accountable to. Whether it’s a global stakeholder or a local stakeholder, they usually say “Yeah, that’s all fine. That’s where you want to get to in the big picture. But we’re demanding of you quarterly or monthly numbers, because that’s what our shareholders expect, or that’s what our owners expect.”
Are you in that situation? Where you’ve got this big long-term goal to change the business but you’ve also got to meet the short-term demands?
What can happen is if you get too focused on BAU, you end up getting way too operational and not looking at how you can create value in the future.
If you get too focused on strategy, you don’t meet those short-term results.
What you’ve got to really balance when responding to problems and responding when you don’t meet a quarterly or monthly target is your tendency to either go to reactivity or sustainability.
And this is how I counteract it.
Those teams that are really reactive go straight into all the small operational problems that are causing you to not meet results in the quarter or a month. They make a list of about 25, and everyone feels satisfied. And then you go and tick a bunch of them off, and it turns it around for one month, but the next month it slips back down again. That’s a reactive approach.
But if we don’t do any reactive, then you’re not fixing the short-term problems that are causing the issue. So you should do some, but if you do all it becomes a problem.
A sustainable approach actually looks at what are the causal or systemic problems that are causing the bad results. Our reactive looks at the surface.
When we look at changing our model to drive different results, if we all choose from REACTIVE, we might get rebound for one month. If we all choose from SUSTAINABLE, we going to wait six months for the return. So the balance is in diagnosing results to make sure you’ve got one or two causal or systemic projects that will deliver you results in two or three quarters time. AND a couple of surface projects that might help you rebound in the next quarter or month.
To give you an example. The SUSTAINABLE ones are about the foundational processes that impact a customer’s experience. And if you fix those right now so that in a year from now when a customer comes in and works with you they’ll have a great experience – you’re going to deliver the results. A great example of a REACTIVE or surface project is to get a sales person to go and sell more. Yes, sometimes that’s needed, but a balance of both is really important if you’re going to get short and long term results.
As a leadership team you are going to have a time when you’re not going to meet expectations and you’re not going to meet results. How you respond defines who you are. It defines whether you’re going to get a short-term reaction with a short-term improvement or a long-term improvement. If you want both, if you want to turn it around in the short to medium term and also set you up for long term success, think about the way you respond. Are you identifying systemic or causal issues that are causing the problem, or are you just creating reactive and surface-level responses to those problems? The way you balance that will define you as a CEO, and it will define you as a leadership team.
Hope this has been useful in helping you guide your team and helping you diagnose what’s causing your lack of results.
Talk to you soon on The Reason & The Road.
