5 Steps to move from “What” to “How” in your Business
You have a vision, the “What of your business”. You’ve shared it. It’s driving your business into action every day.
But if you’ve been working in your business long enough, you know that Vision and Action are not enough on their own.
You can have the vision of becoming a marathon runner, but if you train like a sprinter you can do all the work required, but not succeed. You have a vision. You are a hard worker. You will fail.
When if comes to success, doing the right action well is The How.
By dong the right action well, your business can actually support fulfilling the vision. This is why we hire people and organize our business in a certain way.
5 Key Steps to Developing a Meaningful “How” in your business:
1) Data - Start with learning. Before you come up with action steps take some time to gather data on what is happening in the business. What are people doing with their time? What items are supporting the vision? What items sound good (or actually terrible) but are not supporting the vision? What should be measured, but is not being measured either because the results will stink and no one internally really wants to know. [INSIGHT: The top reason owners bring in consultants is that over time the culture has become too stuck with people who will just say Yes all the time, or by people so invested in the status quo that they will take no meaningful actions. This cycle always needs to be broken.]
2) Identify - Document the Key Issues. These issues can be and combination of the following:
Processes - incorrect, outdated, non-existent,
People - in the wrong seat, just the wrong person, buried by bad processes. I always start with processes and then move to the actual people issues. If you start with people, you run a strong risk of losing critical institutional knowledge. (Of course if people will not learn or change, that institutional “knowledge” must go.)
Communications - are meetings useful, safe, and meaningful to supporting the vision?
Resources - lacking the funds to do what needs to be done can be a critical issue.
3) Measurement - Apply measurements to the “Key Issues” and make sure people on the team own them. These are your new KPI’s.
4) Meet Often - Meet daily and weekly to ensure alignment, issue resolution, and cultural growth. So often meetings are so unproductive that people hate them. If you are wondering about how to address this, schedule time to talk about how to bring new life to your meetings or read Patrick Lencioni’s excellent book Death by Meeting.
5) Process Improvement - Document what you do and create checklists to ensure you are following the defined key processes and keep updating and improving them.
There are many approaches to significantly your processes and business effectiveness. Several of the methodologies are driving amazing results around the world by supporting smart, organizational approaches to business development.
Here are books that support three that are proven winners for business development process how-to support:
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (by Elyahu Goldratt) - this classic is now over 30 years old and written as a novel/fable. But the whole movement focuses on improving profitable throughput in a business while reducing operating costs and capital committed to inventory. This is where the TOC (Theory of Constraints) movement got its start.
Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business (by Gino Wickman) - this book has sparked the EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) and a way to balance Vision and Integrator value within your business. This book is a must read and you can use it immediately.
Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make it…and Why the Rest Don’t, Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (by Verne Harnish and the people at his Gazelles company) - this is the follow up to his earlier book “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits”. You will see things in both the original and this later version that others have been using successfully for decades. It’s a structured approach.
If you want to improve the execution in your business, make a concerted effort to improve your processes to support your vision through people, profits, and planning that delivers. And free yourself up for the even bigger stuff.
In closing, I love this quote below, from the executional superstar of the Disney company. No, it’s from Roy Disney, now Walt.
"When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easy." - Roy Disney
