Don't Take All Opportunities

Leaders, and especially entrepreneurs, are hard-wired to seize opportunities and follow leads.

This is only effective, however, when those leads and opportunities help you move forward in your existing strategy towards your agreed mission and vision.

Otherwise they are a distraction and they suck energy out of you and your organisation.

Always judge potential opportunities against your existing goals and priorities.  Otherwise productivity drops.  

Productivity is like a  reputation. Its hard to acquire but easy to lose!

Plan for Peoductivity

Very few organisations improve productivity  by accident.  They may do so as a ’by-product’ of some other initiative (such as installing new technology or establishing a new workforce development programme) but productivity doesn’t just come along unbidden.

This means that you have to seek it out. You have to plan for it. You have to examine your business and work out what can be improved. You have to ask questions about what you do now - and how you do those things. 

A good, but simple, approach is just to walk the business occasionally looking for signs that things are wrong or could be improved.  Piles of waste or piles of work-in-progress might indicate you could benefit from process change.

Talk to the workers on the shop floor.  What don’t they like about what they do.  What do they think needs changing.

Then talk to the supervisors. Do they identify the same potential problems as the workers?

Go back to the office and check the data. Are there any trends in output levels, quality levels, labour costs, customer satisfaction levels?

When you find something that doesn’t seem quite right, start an investigation to understand the problem or potential improvement? What might happen if you change various factors of the situation? What unintended consequences might there be?

Then start to plan the changes you think will bring benefits.  Prepare for any changes you intend to make - especially to job roles and working methods. Support your workforce through the change.

Don’t wait for productivity to come about. Seek it out and plan for it!

Be Patient

Many business leaders think technology can give them a productivity boost.  

They may well be right.  Addressed properly, changes in technology can transform processes and make them more efficient.

However,. the gains are  not easy to unlock - and they certainly take time.

There may even be a temporary drop in productivity while new technology or a new software system is being implemented.

Often firms under prepare for, or under-resource, the changeover.  They fail to ensure they have customised the technology or system to their specific needs. Then they fail to adequately monitor the changing situation, making sure they are aware of what is working properly and what is not, what parts of the organisation need help during thew changeover process, what needs to be redone, and so on. 

Managers have four simple tasks to carry out: Organising, Planning, Monitoring and Controlling..  Managers must take the time to get all of these right.

This might delay benefits for a little time - but those benefits will come if the project is properly managed.

As the heading to this post says …. Be patient  But while being patient, Manage Well!

Love Monday Mornings?

 If you hate Monday mornings, you are probably in the wrong job … but so many of you, I know, cannot simply change your job at this time.

Perhaps one reason so many people hate Mondays is that they have to move from the freedom of being able to choose what to do to a situation where their day is mapped out for them.

Some people in senior jobs have the luxury of mapping out their own working days - though they are, of course, guided by priorities, emergencies and so on. 

The rest of us do what we are told.  But perhaps there is something we can do.  

We can think about our week and decide not what we are going to do, but what we are going to think about while doing the tasks set out for us (assuming our job does not preclude thought).

We can plan our next holiday.

We can try to write a song.

We can plan a blog post.

We can think about an apology to someone we’ve offended.

Give  yourself a bit of freedom - and plan/create something connected with one of your interests or current problems.

Mondays might then seem quite different.  You will probably find the work easier too and you might be significantly more productive.