Strategic Discipline Blog

Dan and Chip Heath, the authors of Switch, How to Change When Change is Hard, and Made to Stick recently sent out a newsletter FIVE TIPS FOR (FINALLY) GETTING YOUR NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION RIGHT that suggest ideas gleaned from their research that I’d like to suggest you peruse as you consider making your New Year’s resolutions.

What’s the easiest way to initiate strategic discipline?  Start with a daily huddle.  Perhaps your people are accountable already.  Perhaps they have metrics that they measure each day so they know how productive they are.  Perhaps they never get stuck.  And finally quite possibly you never have miscommunication.  Even if you can answer yes to each of these you’ll find the daily huddle brings a marked improvement in communication, accountability, and performance. 

It’s half-time in a girl’s freshman basketball game.  The score 31-9.  My officiating partner and I discuss how difficult our job can become in a lopsided game.  We need to keep our heads in the game despite the score.  The team that’s leading is the first to score in the second half.  They score again, and again, still again.  By the time the third quarter is over they are the only team that’s scored and it’s now 48-9. 

It would hardly be Christmas and the holiday season if most of us weren’t feeling some stress.  It’s a little known fact what the real source of stress is.  What you are stressing about right now?  Most of us are hurrying to get our Christmas gifts purchased, and hoping we don’t forget anyone.  Some males even make it a habit to shop the very last day, Christmas Eve for their significant other.  Add this to your current to do list and it’s no wonder some of us border on insanity this time of year. 

Your business relies on new customers for growth.  It's experiencing an increasing number of no shows for new customer appointments.  You’ve tried a number of changes, and techniques to get your new patients to honor the first visit they’ve scheduled however nothing seems to be working.  The loss of 1 or more appointments per day is a major reduction in efficiency for you and your staff to say nothing of the revenue loss.

Do your meetings lack conflict?  If so, isn’t that good?

A question that frequently comes up is what should I have Key Performance Indicators for in my business? Certainly there are lot of options.  Revenue and profit margin are Key Performance Indicators that everyone should monitor, however these are lagging indicators.   What Key Performance Indicators do you have in place that predict your revenue and profit margin?  Do you monitor your sales effort and have indicators that report on your sales pipeline?  How reliable are these?  Do you monitor your variable costs and fixed expenses?  Contribution margin is a good forecaster of profit margin as well as gross profit margin.  Yet do these give you enough information far ahead of your performance to be true leading indicators?  With time and practice whatever number you choose to watch you can discover which key metrics help predict the crucial outcomes in your business.

As we approach 2011 and put 2010 in the review mirror it’s important to understand that there are two types of key performance indicators in your business: leading and lagging. 

In my monthly newsletter this week, Without A Plan: Expect 40% Less I offered insight into how one of my client’s developed his business.  Through the practice of Strategic Discipline he put himself in position to sell his company at the end of November. 

Last blog Bad Performance is Your Responsibility we discussed how ultimately the results you are getting from your people is your accountability.  The bottom line here is that in order to get the 40% discretionary effort from your people which leads to higher performance you need to identify the behaviors that are producing poor outcomes and arrange consequences that will stop them.  Next identify the behaviors that will produce desirable outcomes and arrange consequences that will positively reinforce them.