As an assessor for the Midlands Excellence Awards, one of the perks I received was a complimentary ticket to the Awards ceremony, which I attended last Thursday. It was a great evening, which around 1200 people attended, representing many companies from across the region and beyond.
Awards
A variety of awards were given out, ranging from the specialist awards to the main Midlands Excellence Award (which was won by the Hanley Economic Building Society). Congratulations to the Hanley Economic Building Society and to the other companies that were highly commended, re-accredited and also to those organisations that were recognised as Ambassadors of Excellence. The awards represent a huge amount of hard work and resulting improvement by both the companies that won and by all the other companies that entered.
Keynote Speech
James Cracknell was an interesting and amusing keynote speaker as he gave an account of his Olympic experience and his subsequent adventures with Ben Fogle (which you may have seen on television).
The thing that struck me most in James’ speech was his honesty about both his strengths and his weaknesses. He was modest of his own achievements and very self-aware with respect to both himself and his own performance.
One of the observations he made that particularly stayed with me was his admission that his main failure during the Amundsen Omega3 South Pole Race was his inability to admit to the team that he was struggling as they were nearing the end of the race. Within a short race, such as James’ Olympic successes, he observed that it was possible just to push through the pain, whereas in a race the length of the South Pole Race, this just wasn’t physically possible.
Together, the team had agreed to help each other out if they were struggling; whilst this increased the load on the other teammates, it was actually the team that won or lost, not the individual. They were only as strong as their weakest member. James explained that by trying to be strong he had actually weakened the team (and potentially lost the team first place).
I respected his honesty, and also wondered what model of ‘performance’ we use within organisations. Is organisational performance about a sprint to the finish or does organisational performance actually have more in common with competitive team endurance races? I wonder if we have much to learn from these experiences.
Overall, a great night and one that I hope to be able to attend again next year.
Businesses tend to go through periods of change and periods of stability as they grow and develop. Many businesses will be inclined to gravitate around a position of stability once they find what works best, whether this be what works best for their strategy, their products and services, or any other part of the business.
However, the challenge remains that, even if the strategies or solutions a business has employed have been effective, they operate in a world of constant change. As a result, something that used to work won’t necessarily carry on working. Something that works well at the moment will reach a point of needing new strategies and new solutions.
Whilst it can be hard to face the fact that something might not be working as well as it once did, the sooner the reality is faced, the sooner changes can be made to improve the situation and restore your business to its position of excellence.
At the beginning of 2010, could you challenge yourself to take an honest look at your business or department? Is it the best it could be? What could work better? And how can you make your business even better for your staff, your customers and yourself?
Profit is an output, not a purpose.
A business must have reason to exist beyond that of making money and maximising shareholder value. Profit cannot be the goal, vision, or the purpose of an organisation. An organisation that posts great year end results doesn’t automatically earn the title of being a great company.
Seeking profit as a primary business purpose is like building a house of cards or building a house on sand – it will eventually lead to collapse (ably demonstrated by many financial institutions over the previous months). Profit is too temporary to guide a business by.
If a business’ main purpose is to make a profit, this will both lead to a lack of strategic direction and reduced staff motivation. For employees, once they have earned the company enough to cover their salaries, they make money for the owner of the business. That’s not a real purpose!
6 good reasons not to use profit as your primary purpose
- Profit is an output and a symptom of success, not the cause.
- Profit is temporary and can be wiped out in an instant.
- In tough times, profit can be hard to come by.
- You need more purpose than profit to make it through.
- Profit doesn’t motivate the salaried staff who make success happen.
- Customers don’t appreciate being seen just for their revenue.
- Consumers are increasingly focusing on values and contribution to society when choosing who to do business with.
Beyond profit…
A true vision for a business rests on foundations of both purpose and values. The people within the business have to be passionate about what they do and why they do it. The business’ goals must then align with this foundation. Without a clear foundation, a business will never be truly strategic.
Values
A business’ core values are defined internally through a process of introspection and discovery, and are based not on the outside but on what lies within. Core values do not change with the seasons but are deeply held values already embedded within the DNA of an organisation.
To give you some examples, core values held by a variety of well-known organisations include: imagination; product excellence; great customer service; respect for the individual; quality; market focus; teamwork.
Your organisation does not have to hold these values but will need to discover its own. Core values are the handful of values that, even when push comes to shove, your business is not prepared to sacrifice to get ahead.
Purpose
The core purpose of a business is also discovered by introspection and discovery. A business’ core purpose is its most fundamental reason for being. By stripping away the layers of what a business does and what motivates it, any company will discover a deeper purpose that unifies and motivates. In essence, to discover your business’ core purpose, you could ask, “Why does this business exist?”
Again, to give you an example, the core purpose of my wife’s tutoring business is to “Help people realise their full potential.”
Why does your business do what it does? What is the bottom line about why you make the products you make or deliver the services you deliver?
6 good reasons for your business to look beyond profit
- Purpose and values motivate and unify management and staff.
- Purpose and values give a company a solid foundation from which to make decisions.
- Purpose and values provide a navigational compass to all elements of the business.
- Customers will have more to buy into and engage with.
- Purpose and values encourage loyalty of both staff and customers.
- Purpose and values encourage a strong culture and ethos within a business.
What next?
Start working on it! You need to involve staff and managment alike and discuss and argue over what the key values your business does (or should) hold and what, at the end of the day, your business is about. Look beyond what it does. In challenging times such as these, going back to basics and understanding the bottom line foundation of your business may well be the thing that gets you and your staff through.
If you would like support through this process, then please contact me. You may also be interested in my workshop, Vision, purpose & values: a solid foundation.
Many thanks go to James Collins and Jerry Porras, whose work provided the foundation for this article: Collins, J.C. & Porras, J.I. (1996), Building Your Company’s Vision, Harvard Business Review.
Learning is a key part of what I do.
I’m learning and developing my own skill-set all the time. I push myself to learn new skills and develop existing ones.
If I don’t grow and develop, I limit my business and limit my clients’ businesses.
Learning is a process. I put time, money and effort into that process, through which I am rewarded with increased knowledge and skill.
Yet, whenever and whatever I’m learning, I’ve noticed the same two feelings occur: excitement and frustration.
The frustration occurs during the stages in the process at which I am investing time and effort, but don’t have the immediate gratification of knowing and understanding.
The excitement comes from ‘knowing’ something new and being able to do something that I couldn’t do before. Learning is fun!
So what can we learn from this process?
- We need to judge frustration correctly. Will the frustration break through to excitement, in which case we just need to keep pressing on? Or do we need some help or need to pursue another avenue? It is pointless pressing on if the frustration is there because we have reached a dead end, but we also shouldn’t give up too quickly.
- If we are not getting frustrated about the learning process, then this may be telling us that we’re not being stretched enough. Maybe we’re just coasting when we should be pushing through into a new area.
- ‘Breakthrough’ is difficult to predict – normally it comes after, or in the middle of, frustration, but we have no way of knowing exactly when it will happen. It often feels like one of those lightbulb moments when suddenly it all makes sense.
Applying this to our businesses…
In business, we find the experience of learning in both our own personal development and also in the implementation of new projects and tasks. How often have you felt frustrated that a project seems to be going nowhere and you just feel stuck? Maybe you’re trying to re-write the copy for your website but you just can’t quite grasp those elusive words that say what you really want to say! The same principles as above apply.
- We need to judge frustration in a project correctly. It may be that we’re on the right path, we just haven’t reached the point of breakthrough yet; in which case, we need to keep pressing on. Alternatively, we may need some external input and support – it’s amazing what a fresh pair of eyes can see. Or, we may have actually reached a dead end; using a business analogy, maybe the marketplace we’re competing in just isn’t the right one anymore and we need to target a new set of customers.
- If all the projects we take on as a company or as individuals are easy and never give us any sense of breaking through, it may be that we’re coasting. Although coasting can be great – especially if the company is making good profits and returns from something that they find relatively easy – coasting can lead to complacency and also never gives that great sense of achievement we gain from breaking through in something we’ve found quite challenging. I can’t imagine that the truly great companies out there have ever achieved that status without stretching themselves.
- Breakthrough is difficult to predict, so when we feel we really are on the right path, we need to press on through and not get discouraged. Breakthrough may be just around the corner and it will be a fantastic moment of elation when we reach it.
One of the key challenges in business improvement is “holding the gain”.
Holding the gain means ensuring that, once improvements to your business have been implemented, the area you have been working on stays improved. Continually.
Without a focus on holding the gain, you run the risk that when you move onto the next development project, all your hard won gains from the last are lost. As your focus moves elsewhere in the business, there is a danger that you leave the previous improvements to slowly deteriorate.
So how can you make sure you don’t lose your hard won gain? Shewhart/Deming’s PDCA Cycle is a good place to start…
- Plan. Work out your improvement plan before you start implementing it so you know exactly what you’ve agreed, how you are going to measure it and what you are expecting to be the result.
- Do. If you don’t actually carry out the improvement, you won’t find out if it works! “If objectives are only good intentions they are worthless. They must degenerate into work.” (Drucker, 2007, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, p.101)
- Check. If you don’t check your target measures (e.g. volume of sales) before implementing the improvement and after it has been implemented, you’ll only be guessing as to whether the improvement worked. Checking these measures allows you to find out if the improvement is achieving the results you expected. A note of caution however – make sure you allow enough time for the improvement to bed-in before you jump to conclusions about the results. Some measures may take several months to achieve the intended results; checking them in the first week may lead you to believe the improvement has not worked, whereas really it just needed time to get up to speed. Over time, you will then need to keep checking these results at regular intervals: this allows you to compare performance to the results you got first time around and to your expected results over time, thereby assessing whether the improvement is still performing at the expected level or whether it has lost its gain over time.
- Act. Having planned, done and checked, you now need to act. If the improvement has had the desired results, you need to act to hold your gain, or if it hasn’t performed as expected, you may need to start again by re-planning. It can be tempting to quickly move onto the next area of improvement without actually putting in measures to ensure you hold your gain. Measures to hold your gain may include (for example): revising processes; (re)writing policy; implementing ongoing staff training processes, and so on. And, at this stage, don’t forget to schedule the next time you’re going to check your results again to ensure you’ve held the gain over the long term.
Once you’ve done all of the above, you may proceed to plan your next improvement!
Becoming aware of how areas within your business communicate with your customers is vital if you want to convey a consistent message about your brand/business.
The difficulty is that your customers don’t just read the words you write, or hear what you say about your business. They tend to read a whole lot more into every single interaction with your business. Both consciously and unconsciously. They even read things into the interactions they don’t have, or the things you don’t do.
Some examples…
- Shabby carpet in a reception area.
Customer perception: Maybe your business isn’t doing very well if you can’t afford a new carpet.
- Taking a long time to answer the phone.
Customer perception: Maybe you don’t actually want my business.
- Old fashioned branding.
Customer perception: Maybe you are just an old fashioned company delivering out-of-date solutions.
Becoming aware of what your business is saying about itself can be hard when you’re so close to it, but with some outside help you can train yourself into noticing again. Try interacting with your business as if you were a customer – how does it make you feel? What would you be thinking if you saw or experienced those things in another business? Ask your friends, family, colleagues and customers what they think about your business. Listen to their honest opinions. Then aim to change the things you can.
Being confident that your business is communicating what you want to communicate is a great place to be. Don’t let your business undermine what it is you really want to say!
Business excellence isn’t about being the ‘perfect’ business. And it isn’t about always getting everything right.
But nor is it accepting and maintaining the status quo.
Rather, business excellence is about the continual striving to develop and improve our businesses, one step at a time.
It is a mindset that says, “Whatever and wherever my business is right now, it can be better, and it will be better.”
And so that’s what we do: we take each element of our business, assess it, and improve it. We listen to our customers, we listen to our staff, we listen to people in the know, and then we act.
Again, and again, and again.
And the result?
We have more loyal customers, more involved staff, better products/services, more efficient operations, more awareness of what is going on around us in the market place.
Our businesses start to become stronger, more competitive, better.
That’s real world business excellence!
I recently came across a blog post titled “What if Carlsberg did redundancies?” by Lou Burrows, who, when faced with having to make redundancies at her company, helped her team completely rethink their approach by asking the question “If Carlsberg did redundancies, what would they do?”
Though redundancy is not something that anyone would wish for, by asking the question and looking at what could be possible, it opened up new innovative thought and freedom from previous expectations.
“It really got us thinking. It would be like their adverts – somehow it would all be okay, people would get new jobs (probably better ones), they’d get the best looking references in the world, they’d be introduced to their next employer, we’d all manage to stay friends and people would feel happy and confident when they left. Oh yes, and everyone left behind would be fine about the changes. And we’d all have a leaving do together with speeches and music – a real celebration of our time together.”
By asking the question, “What if Carlsberg did redundancies…?” they discovered a new benchmark. They managed to provide a somewhat different experience for all involved.
“We got to the end of the consultation and, though it was not like a Carlsberg ad, we did manage to get pretty close. That question forced us to think through the problem from a different perspective and to go the extra mile just to see what the possibilities really were in this difficult process.”
The Power of the “What if…?”
The question was the tool that unlocked the possibilities. Without the question, people’s pre-existing expectations about the situation would have been the most dominant force.
The question is based upon the ‘truth’ that Carlsberg can make things great, whatever they are. That they can take something ordinary we know and love and create something extraordinary; “probably the best…”
By taking something we can engage with and allowing us to disengage the ‘practical realities of life’, it allows us to dream. In the land of Carlsberg anything is possible, and it’s all about you and me.
If Carlsberg made your product or delivered your service, what would they do? How would they take something ordinary and make it extraordinary? How would they excite and engage your customers and give them something to talk about for weeks afterward?
The power of the “Why not…?”
The ‘What if…?” question is only powerful if it is translated into a reality of some kind. Therefore, the next question after ‘What if…? must be “Why not…?”
Well, why can’t you? Why can’t you make what you just dreamed a reality? It’s easy to say to ourselves that it’s just not practical, or that no-one else does it, but seriously, why not?
Delivering a leading edge product or service may just give you the market edge. Or in the case of Lou Burrows, delivering redundancies with a difference meant that a tough situation was made a little bit kinder. Although you may not be able to create ‘the best’ or fully deliver your “What if…?” dreams, what if we all tried to get that little bit closer?
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