Business Coaching for Owners & Managers of Small Businesses

I receive a regular email titled, “Management Intelligence…… from Edward de Bono and Robert Heller”^[[1]] . Their most recent email was “Management Intelligence: A proven checklist for business success”. Here is the checklist they provided:

“DO YOU…

1. IMPROVE basic, measured efficiencies continuously?
2. THINK simply and directly about what you are doing and why?
3. BEHAVE towards others as you wish them to behave towards you?
4. EVALUATE each business and business opportunity with total, fact-based objectivity?
5. CONCENTRATE on what you do well?
6. ASK questions ceaselessly about performance, markets and objectives?
7. MAKE MONEY- knowing that, if you don’t, you can’t make anything else?
8. ECONOMISE always seeking Limo (Least Input for Most Output)?
9. FLATTEN the organisation to spread authority and responsibility?
10. ADMIT to your own failings and shortcomings and correct them?
11. SHARE the benefits of success with all those who helped to achieve it?
12. TIGHTEN up the organisation wherever and whenever you can because familiarity breeds slackness?
13. ENABLE everybody to optimise their individual and group contribution?
14. SERVE your customers with all their requirements to standards of perceived excellence in quality?
15. TRANSFORM performance by innovating creatively in products and processes including the processes of management?

Again from this email concerning this list: “These questions penetrate to the heart of successful management. They have passed, and will pass, the test of time.

This list looks a lot like others I have seen, and certainly many entries would be on such a list that I might create. But, whenever I see lists like this, I say to myself, “Great, but how do I do this?” Lets just take number 15, for example,  “Transform performance by innovating….”. What business processes do I put in place that assure that these results are regularly and sustainably produced? Or, what approaches and tools do I deploy to achieve number 8, “Economize…” ? Again, are there tools and approaches available that assure the we meet number 13, “ENABLE everybody to optimize their individual and group contribution?”

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1. http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/ [↩]

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Delegation and Outsourcing Share a Common Management Focus on What Needs To be Done, What Are the Results Required, and When?

 

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Yesterday I was scanning through the Tweets from my friend Bruce Peters and came across a reference to a blog posting by Bernadette Doyle, “Discern Your Strengths – Delegate The Rest“. Its always good to return to these complementary concepts – strengths and delegation (outsourcing), so I read on.

Ms. Doyle’s concatenation of “delegation” and “outsourcing” is a very productive idea. Delegation is normally seen to be a personal act by a manager. A manager delegates certain tasks or responsibilities to someone else in the organization. Outsourcing is most frequently the retention of a third party, external to the company, to perform a function or tasks. Setting these two side by side provides an interesting example of the overlap between the personal skills and attributes of the manager and the larger practice and processes of the organization.

Be a More Effective Manager – stop answering those questions, seize your time, and it’s your fault

 

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Become a More Effective Manager – Three Counter-Intuitive Steps

In the world of planning and strategy, there is a truism that too much planning, too much detail, too much analysis, leads to inaction, to a loss of opportunity. Along the same line of observation, in the world of learning to becoming a more effective manager, there can be too much study, too much thinking, too much integration of the many many skills and aptitudes required to become more effective. In both strategy and management skills action is almost always preferable to another round of study. Action bumps you up against the real world and provides the real basis for improving skills and results.

But, that still leaves us with the nagging question as a manager, especially for rookie managers and supervisors, how do I get started?

Based on many years of personal work as a manager and many years coaching managers, here are three steps you can take that will get you into action and guarantee striking results. These results will come in your personal effectiveness and in of the results of the organization you manage.  Remember,  by results, I am referring to the three meanings Drucker defined: (1) direct business results (usually measured in $s); (2) improved organizational culture (values); and (3) development of people.^[[1]]

1. Stop Answering Questions

If most managers could listen to themselves, the proverbial fly on the wall, for just a few hours, they would discover that they are chronically enabling dependency all around them and undermining whatever formal delegation systems are in place. How is this happening? Just listen and you will hear a stream of questions coming at them followed by answers in response. You are enabling the following the reflexive pattern: ask the expert and be rewarded with answers. Ask the boss, get an answer, and be safe from responsibility for the answers.

If you want to get people to take responsibility and be involved in the business, you can’t go on answering all these questions. They will just go on asking whether they need to or not. And, you are spending an enormous amount of your time, your most valuable resource, to answering all of these questions.

What should a manager do to break this pattern?

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1. see Chapter 2 – What Can I Contribute? in his book The Effective Executive [↩]

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Recent work with a client brought home to me again the interplay of TPS (Toyota Production system) and intuition.

We were working on developing a job scheduling system in a classic job shop environment. We had worked out a rough value stream map from sales inquiry to shipping. It was clear that there was very little data anywhere. This was a small business environment where everything existed in the heads of the key players. The owner repeatedly asked when we were going to get to the job scheduling system and, “Mark, what is it going to look like and how will it work?”

I kept fending the team off by telling them that we had to push our mapping as far as we could and then, “The answers will appear from the map. It will be clear to all of you how to solve the problems.”

Yesterday’s New York Times contained an article by David Pogue, “Mom and Pop Get a Partner: Microsoft”, that announces a whole new suite of services for small businesses from Microsoft. And they are all virtually free. You can set up a website in minutes, purchase your own domain name for free for the first year, get email, use collaborative tools including calendaring, project management, shared documents and more. All of this come with some pretty powerful user access controls so that you can set up teams to collaborate internally or include your customers and everyone sees and changes only what they are supposed.

I would say that anyone in a startup or small business who does not already have a website and these other tools should immediately click on over to Microsoft’s OfficeLive site and check this out. This will require some real work to take advantage of all of the tools available here, but it is not often that such a comprehensive suite is available essentially for free.

An important step for every business manager is to understand where profits are coming from. Too many managers are relying on  the basic Profit and Loss statement that comes to them from their accountant. This is not always a useful management tool.

Lets take a look at a situation where a web-based services company is experiencing good growth and reasonable profits. They have four lines of business addressing their single basic service to four different markets. Based on their market analysis, they decide that they will focus their marketing dollars and development resources on one of the four for the next year.

Six months into the mission, sales have continued upwards, but profits are not tracking along at the same rate, the quality of earnings is suffering. Why is this happening?

We have recently added a new feature to our operations improvement work for services firms.

To improve the productivity, responsiveness, and quality of services, a common and very valuable approach is to organize a cross-functional team and value stream map the activities. This quickly produces many opportunities to improve flow, simplify tasks, and shrink response times. One frustration with this technique is that it provides no approach to how to model the “moments of truth” that are really the focal points for all service production.

Moments of truth are those interactions with customers (these can be in person, over the telephone, and via a web interface amongst others) during which a service is created and delivered. It is the moment when a question is asked and an answer provided. Or, it is the more complex environment in which the service provider and the customer collaborate, even if briefly, to solve some problem with a product.