Strategic Discipline Blog

A recipe for a great meal is only as good as its presentation.  Clarity in your business is only as good as your ability to communicate it and then implement.  So perhaps your buying into to the idea of creating a vision for your business as the recipe for growth.  What's next? Gazelles One Page Strategic Plan provides clarity and action steps to not only broadcast your intentions but to provide steps to get everyone on board and contributing to the momentum of your top priorities.  It's the key to not only achieving clarity in your business, it provides the next action steps.  You must not only indicate where you are going, you must give your team a way to climb on board and contribute.

In Clarity Dissolves Resistance we discussed how many business owners and executives fail to understand the importance of determining a vision for their business.  While small business owners [less than $1M in revenue] may be more guilty of this than mid-size business owners, it’s not hard to find this lack of vision in larger companies.  The changing economy, advancing technology, competitive pressures, internal challenges all contribute to this so-called fog of war.  It can dull the senses and reduce the leader’s appreciation for developing a vision.  Setting priorities and communicating them to employees is critical to growth. 

How do you motivate action?  Whether it's your employees or customers it's a good idea to make them feel like they have a head start to the finish line.

If you've been watching any news of late you've seen several incidents where employees who have not received favorable performance reviews have gone off and actually murdered their peers or supervisors. If there's an indictment against performance reviews or at least how they are being conducted this is a good example of it. 

The expert on this is Aubrey Daniels and his book Oops, 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money lists Performance Reviews as #3 on his list.   Performance reviews go against rule number three and four of Aubrey's Making Performance Work errors to avoid [See Positive and Negative Reinforcement - Oops].

If there's two things that have been consistent in my coaching training with Gazelles [Rockefeller Habits] and E-Myth is that performance reviews are not good tools for improving morale or getting better performance.

Aubrey Daniels quote sums up the lessons we teach in Gazelles coaching, "The best job you will ever have is one in which you know how well you have done at the end of every working day."   

If you still believe in Performance Reviews ask yourself this question. What are you trying to accomplish?

Here are some keys to creating an organization where people do their best every day based on the value of positive reinforcement:

• Knowledge of how you are doing is essential to any kind of improvement
• The best feedback cycle is immediate
• Every job can be measured and
• Performers will help you measure them when they learn that measure is sued to help them perform better and not used as a basis for criticism and punishment.
• The goal of this type of appraisal should be to have all employees performing in the top group.
• Rewards for managers should be contingent on the number of performers reaching the top level, not some aggregate measure of the unit performance.
• When manager success is determined by the employee success it changes the behavior of the manger from evaluator to coach. That creates more involvement in the day to day performance of employees by the manager.

All these points are from Aubrey Daniels book Oops. He points out that managers and supervisors should be teachers and coaches who job it is to transfer their knowledge and experience to others in an efficient and positive manner. It's not to sit in judgment. 

John D Rockefeller life is told in the book Titan by Ron Chernow.  Much has been said about the man often claimed to be the richest man in the world.  Verne Harnish, founder of Gazelles put Rockefeller's genius for business into a book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits which distills his principles into a remarkably insightful 150 pages. 

Jim Collins in Built to Last and Good to Great discussed the importance of creating your BHAG. In the real world my guess is that very few businesses discover their BHAG either because they've never heard of it, or don't understand the value it can have in growing their business.   

Would you like to get more value from your team? Maximize their output and contribution?

If you’ve been following the markets and the $700 billion financial bailout the most powerful message you can absorb as the market and the financial segment of our economic base absorbs shock waves from the continuing impact of the subprime debacle is this – there’s been a failure in following fundamentals. 

Even though I’m big supporter and believer in Michael Gerber’s principles as provided in The E-Myth Revisited, Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What To Do About It, and was a Certified E-Myth Coach for ten years, my coaching experience with over 250 small to mid-sized businesses has provided a keen insight into where some of Michael’s assertions don’t always work in the real world.  

John D Rockefeller understood how to operate a successful business. That’s why he grew Standard Oil into the mega giant it became. Verne Harnish [Mastering the Rockefeller Habits] has distilled the principles Rockefeller used to achieve success and as a Gazelle’s business coach we use these daily in our coaching practices to help our clients follow the same success formula that Rockefeller gained.