I often tell my clients that business is simple, but people complicate it. If you practice discipline on the following 10 items, I guarantee you will see rapidly improved business results:
- Your mission statement and core values should be easy to read and understandable, and revisited in every leadership/management meeting before you get started. This information should also be posted in as many locations as possible.
- Ensure your organization manages to a dashboard of 5-7 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and then makes the results public and the topic of ongoing management discussions.
- The organization should conduct a strategic planning process every 3–5 years, which establishes a strategic direction for the company with supporting goals and major action items.
- Ensure that you don’t make significant decisions in an ad hoc or instinctive manner. Create and use a formal decision-making process that aligns with the previous three points and adhere to it.
- Ensure that each of your direct reports has a concise position description that clearly outlines their responsibilities and defines success. Individual definitions of success should easily relate to your mission, values, goals, and organization-wide key performance indicators.
- Have regular 1-on-1 meetings with your direct reports where you discuss their individual progress in their position, obstacles to their continued success, balancing shifting priorities, checking in on major action items, and discussing training and support needs. I highly encourage you to create a 1-on-1 culture throughout all levels of your company.
- Have all your direct reports meet as a leadership team at least monthly, where you discuss progress against key performance indicators and goals, balance organization-wide priorities, and coordinate performance efforts.
- Ensure you have an HR approach that carefully hires people and screens individual employees for basic leadership and management competencies before promoting them to a supervisory position. After the promotion, make sure to provide continuous training and support to foster individual growth and development.
- Establish the infrastructure within your company to regularly solicit customer feedback, reward success, identify opportunities, and make adjustments based on this information.
- Ensure that every employee has at least some variable pay included in their compensation package. The higher an individual goes in your organization, the more their pay should fluctuate based on performance.
Leadership is not rocket science. Creating the conditions for business success involves following some basic concepts:
- Be clear about where you are going and why
- Define what success looks like and track performance
- Make sure all your key people are on the same page
- Don’t “wing it” when it comes to important decisions
- Ensure that every single employee knows how they fit into the big picture and what they are supposed to be doing
- Create a process for providing ongoing performance feedback
- Hold people accountable for results
- Be careful about who you hire and put in supervisory roles
- Provide extensive training and support
- Never stop communicating with your customers
- Make sure everyone shares in the success of the business, but also feels the pinch of nonperformance