All Systems GO!

In our work with all types of organizations over the past 20 years, our COMPROSE business coaches have seen a long list of preconceptions, beliefs, and mistakes that derail performance and morale, but here are five of the most common and serious.   We’ll delve into these in more depth and discuss “opportunities to excel” by streamlining business processes in future posts.

#1. Operating by happenstance - no operating plan. It is extremely difficult to coordinate inter-departmental activities. "Turf" wars block progress and drain time and energy. Very few tasks are standardized. The right hand doesn't know−or often care−what the left hand is doing. It is difficult to identify and remedy operational problems and rolling out new initiatives is slow, expensive and prone to failure.

#2. Playing the blame game when things go wrong instead of building a system or looking for failures in the system. It is human nature to start looking for someone or something to point fingers at when something goes wrong. You may think it’s the economy, or maybe it’s a certain manager or an annoying customer.  When you don’t have a system, what else can you blame?

#3. Ignoring Operations Perfection at the Detailed Level ( aka “don't bore me”)  Many executives concern themselves only with the big-picture, strategic level issues.  But the ones who really are great at execution and operations make sure the details are handled as well. We’re not advocating that executives and leaders immerse themselves in the detail or spend a lot of their own personal time here, but they should put someone in their organization in charge of it and they should be very vocal in supporting excellence even at all levels and build a culture in which everyone has a vested interest in continuous perfecting.   

#4. Ignoring Soft Costs – Time Isn’t Free. No question, hard costs such as tangible assets are easier to measure, but the days of ignoring people costs (soft costs) are over.  In today’s economic downturn it is time to start looking under every rock.  Just because someone is on the payroll doesn’t mean that they are free.  Its time to look at how people up and down the chain of command could better do their jobs and what they need.  Where is there waste?  Putting in a plan to systematically reduce errors and inefficiencies is essential especially in today’s economy. 

#5. Not Making Employees (or Yourself) Accountable This is the BIG one. We’ll just leave it alone for now because we’re going to write a lot about this topic later. But it needs to go on the list and it needs to be something ALL business leaders do some soul-searching about.  

In future posts we'll be talking a lot about “managing by systems.”  It’s a practical application of “systems thinking” that you don’t hear much about. But once you understand it, you’ll be amazed at how powerful it is.

In the meantime, download our Free Ebook: How to be an Operations Superhero and check out our upcoming series of free informational webinars on standardizing operations, writing policies and procedures, and corporate training among other topics.