Companies change faster when they can build momentum and leverage great teamwork.
For over a decade I supported many leaders in SMEs & large companies to reinvent themselves and evolve their businesses.
The consulting sector has done wonders to help companies evolve by providing the latest strategies, industry best practices, and know-how. This advice is helpful because it typically compares what you do to what others are doing and points you in the right direction.
The power of advice comes to fruition when leaders and teams work in perfect synergy.
Here are 3 distinctions to help your teams regain traction and get more done:
- Explain the concept, nor the details
Most people you employ today are domain experts, with loads of ideas and fresher perspectives.
By explaining what you are trying to get done, instead of diving into the detail, they will have the creative freedom to experiment and think outside the box.
For example, if you hired an ops person you could say: “I’d like your help in streamlining this sales process, we’ve been losing loads of opportunities because we can’t capitalise on the quote requests we are getting through. You have complete creative freedom on the how. But I need an x result/conversion rate by y date, can you help?”
Once the concept of what you are trying to get done is clear to them, they can work out the detail.
- The perfectionist mindset
Encourage incremental improvements over perfectionism.
Quoting vastly successful serial entrepreneur Daniel Priestley, perfectionism is protectionism.
Particularly when you need to change things fast.
80% ready is good enough.
Expecting 100% readiness would have worked in the post-industrial age, where companies lasted decades and there were far less external competitive factors. The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies has decreased by almost 50 years in the last century, from 67 years in the 1920s to just 21 years today.
Encourage incremental improvements where 80% ready is good enough, at least as a first reiteration to build on…
- Climbing the wrong walls
Quoting leadership guru Stephen R. Covey:
“Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.”
And when you are pivoting a company, you really want to be climbing the right wall.
Counterintuitively, that’s better done by slowing down and becoming an interested listener to your SMEs. They will know whether you are climbing the wrong walls right away.
In many cases that happens because time-based company cultures incentivise activity over results.
Hire great people and listen attentively to what they have to say.
