Are your business problems terminal or healthy?

18 October 2011 Leave a comment

Diagnosing your stage of business development

Adizes theory of being able to reach and stay at the stage he terms ‘prime’, is based on his belief that the future of businesses is predictable and manageable. The first action step is to plot your position on his lifecycle curve. There are certain signs and indicative symptoms to identify stages of organisational development or decay.

Age, Size and Self-Control

Neither chronological age nor size determines the stage an organisation occupies on the corporate lifecycle. There are 108 year old companies which demonstrate flexibility, adaptation, change, and growth, and five year old companies that show age, staleness, predictability, and disconnection from their market.

The two conditions, which can be correlated to age and size but not necessarily caused by them, are flexibility and self-control. These are the central factors in a company reaching prime. Until prime, the company has been flexible but uncontrollable, and after prime it is controllable, but it has grown rigid.

Changing at Different Rates

It is not automatic that a company develops all areas at the same rate. For instance, in a young company, marketing and sales usually change rapidly while accounting stays locked in tried and true formulas, and concern for human resources has yet to emerge. This position reflects disintegration rather than integration – and herein lays one of the essential issues. We are healthy when we are a unified whole, whether psychologically or physically. When solving business problems, you look at what steps will bring the pieces together, rather than cause more disintegration.

“If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going.” Professor Irwin Corey

There is also another element to diagnosing a company’s problems: you must differentiate between external integration and internal integration. External integration is that energy expended on identifying and satisfying clients needs, and internal integration is what it takes to coordinate the efforts within a company to produce the desired results. A company in it’s prime has developed equilibrium between both internal and external integration.

However, be careful not to over-simplify; all companies develop unevenly, and this is to be expected because systems develop their subsystems in sequence. An observation from Adizes, and consistent with my experience with most clients, is that changes to whatever position is diagnosed need to be incremental. Companies change from one stage to the next, perhaps rapidly, but there is no leap-frogging. Although rapid change brings with it torrents of problems, managers must be careful to assess which of those are critical, and which can be delegated or passed over. Moving a company through these necessary transitions first requires a conscious awareness (at company level, not just individually) of the need for assistance. This calls for openness between members of the organisation and honesty in dealing with one another. The higher the company’s self-awareness, the more receptive it will be to change.

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This is the second in a series of posts summarising Adizes approach to achieving and sustaining business prosperity.  If you’ve only just joined the discussion, the first post entitled ‘Is your business in its prime?‘ will give you an overview. Other posts in this series can easily be found by clicking the ‘Adizes’ tag.

If there is anything you would like to comment on in this or any of the other articles, please click the ‘Leave a comment’ button at the top of the post.

If you’d like help to address any of the matters raised, just give me a call on 0412 921 292 for a confidential discussion. Even if I can’t help you myself, I’ll probably know someone who can! As a TEC Chair (www.TEC.com.au) I have access to a worldwide network of resources and consultants.

Filed under Business, Directorship, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management, Organisation, Performance, Planning, Strategy, Systems Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

12 things managers must do to create a great workplace 2 of 12

11 October 2011 Leave a comment

2. Materials and Equipment

We have all been in the frustrating position facing an expectation without having the tools necessary to achieve it. For employees, the importance of having the materials and equipment they need to do their jobs right is one of the 12 key discoveries from a multiyear research effort by The Gallup Organization.

[Our objective was to identify the consistent dimensions of workplaces with high levels of four critical outcomes: employee retention, customer satisfaction, productivity and profitability. The research identified 12 dimensions that consistently correlate with these four outcomes -- dimensions Gallup now uses to measure the health of a workplace. An associated research effort, in which Gallup studied more than 80,000 managers, focused on discovering what great managers do to create quality workplaces.

In providing the necessary workplace tools, we face the challenge of maximizing potential by appropriately matching individuals, each of whom has a wide range of skills and knowledge, with the right tools. If this matching is not thoroughly examined, there can be great cost for the individual, the organization, or both.

Many organizations, for example, have come into the computer era boldly and rapidly. Salespeople have been supplied with laptop computers with the idea that computers will help them manage time, keep accounts organized, communicate with the home office, and so on. But many salespeople don't use them.

Companies tend to view this lack of usage as a training issue. So they send the salespeople off to a computer course to build a comfort level with computers, and their salespeople end up using them to play solitaire. In other words, sometimes we give people materials and equipment they actually don't need to do their job right.

There is also another issue measured by this item. In today's non-hierarchical, flat organization, employees are looking around for clues that define their standing in the social order of things. Materials and "stuff" have become those clues. So, a manager may be requested to put a conference table in an employee's office, only to discover that the main reason is "because Julie has a conference table in her office, and I am as important as she is." There is, therefore, a relational component to this item as well.

The best managers shift the decision to the employee. They ask, "How will this new tool or piece of equipment help you as an employee, our company, and our customers? This broadens the perspective of the employee, elicits an explanation of desired outcomes, and builds better communication between individuals and managers. It also takes the manager out of the traditional "parent" role and allows for true ownership and accountability.]

Please leave a comment, or phone me on 0412 921 292 if you’d like some help in your business to implement any of what you’ve read here.

Filed under Business, Management, Organisation, Performance, Productivity Tagged with , , , ,

10 biggest sales training mistakes and how to avoid 2 of 10

4 October 2011 Leave a comment

2. Companies Teach Too Much Strategy and Not Enough Execution

Look on the shelves in a typical sales office and you’ll find scores of sales books, sales tapes, sales videos, program workbooks, manuals, guides, etc. – all filled with the latest sales techniques or the trendiest strategy-of-the-day. No doubt these techniques and strategies all had value when they were taught. They probably delivered one or two good ideas that one or two people implemented to some degree. But now they’re just old ideas, stored on the shelf and in the deep recesses of a salesperson’s mind.

Let’s face it, there is no shortage of new sales strategies in the world. There are tons of programmes and ideas and sales concepts that trainers will gladly come in and teach to your sales team. And this, unfortunately, passes as a “sales training program” for many people. They simply bring in one or two new trainers each year to teach their strategy.

While learning all this strategy is fine…there is a glaring problem – no one is focusing on execution!

By execution we mean the simple act of performing the fundamentals of what makes salespeople successful (which we’ll cover in later points).

It’s like a farmer who brings in consultant after consultant, trainer after trainer – all arriving with their strategies and ideas on how to run a successful farm — meanwhile he never plants a seed…tends to the weeds…or harvests a single plant. But he does know HOW he SHOULD do it!

The answer is to shift the focus away from JUST learning new strategy and on to the execution of the fundamentals.

We’re not suggesting that the farmer shouldn’t learn new ideas, we’re simply saying that the new ideas will go much further if he’s paying attention to the fundamentals of good farming!

If/when you are ready for some sales training that focuses on execution, call me on 0412 921 292.

Comments?

Filed under Business, Selling, Training Tagged with , ,

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