While some of my clients are interested in the theory behind business approaches, many are pressed for time and want a simple framework which would guide their thinking. A client observed: “We are so inundated with production work, please keep it simple and brief.”
In my opinion any company has to implement the following seven steps:
1. Appoint the right people. Select very carefully and only the best talent. Be coached on how to select professionally and to ask the right talent-based questions. You need people who will understand their roles and contributions to making them and your company grow. You have to offer jobs matched to the talents of the applicants. Include your values in your selection criteria.
2. Determine direction with your people and involve, if possible, everyone in developing your company’s strategic and operational plans. Develop sound, simple and balanced plans and insights which are strategic to your survival and growth.
3. Install basic systems and ensure that you have reliable information and data on hand.
4. Build people and mould a well-functioning team by focusing on their strengths (talents (recurring patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour), knowledge and skills); by providing positive, thoughtful feedback; by providing opportunities to flourish, learn and grow.
5. Focus on your clients and stakeholders and really understand what experiences and emotions your company and its products stimulate in them.
6. Execute your plans/ideas meticulously as a team. Make the discipline of execution part of your strategy. “Now that we know what we want to achieve, how will we achieve it?” Link execution and results to your reward and performance appraisal system.
7. Create a specific culture - and do so in terms of a culture strategy which is aimed at purposefully creating a work environment which attracts and retains the right people. Not any people. The right people with talents which are specifically needed by your company to execute its plans.
I’ll be the first to state that these seven steps are not simple. But even if you are at present doing everything in your company very informally, you have to admit nothing in these seven steps is strange. In fact, you are doing something within the area defined by each step.
The question therefore is how well are you doing what you are doing? Are you satisfied?
Albert
PS The seven steps are also on my website where I adjusted them after having simplified them for this post: http://www.abplan.co.za/what-we-do/strategic-processes.html
Filed under: leadership Tagged: | company culture, execute plans, human resources, organisation, planning
