Beyond Goals … Beyond Lean

2. Taking your company Beyond

Beyond takes you further than Goals programs or LEAN initiatives. It gives you a comprehensive Prescription to follow. Staying with it will continually organize and improve your business through your team. Initially it will be like going to your doctor with some symptoms that are bothering you - some of which may not even be apparent to you; some that you may have been disregarding for years and some that you may want to ignore completely. Your doctor will assure you that she will uncover your problems’ true causes and then make you better. She will already have books of symptoms and their causes for reference. If she doesn’t have the right references she will get the one(s) she needs. She will ask you to describe your symptoms in detail. She will then examine you, looking for more clues and send you for testing. Tests might include an external X-ray or CT scan or an internal exam like a Laryngoscopy or other procedures to get as much information as possible to aid in her diagnosis. Using your description of symptoms, the results of the tests along with conferring with colleagues, an analysis is made and a diagnosis follows. She then sets up a plan for treatment for your recovery. You are involved and consulted and only then will she prescribe specific medications. She will tell you that this medicine has helped many with similar symptoms. The results of taking these medications will be tracked through follow up appointments and evaluations. And your doctor will not release you until your symptoms are gone; the true causes of your problems are found and treated. You are cured. The symptoms never to return again.

Beyond will be similar. It will start by reaffirming the purpose of a business and espousing the premise that every company, even your company, can be better - probably a lot better! And given that premise, it will share with you common, undesirable symptoms found in other companies that could be doing better. Next it will catalog and prioritize the shortcomings found in actual companies that had issues and have been helped. It will be interesting to note the high percentage of companies that exhibited these shortcomings. In most cases, management would have disagreed or were not even aware that those shortcomings existed.

Beyond will ask if you recognize some of these symptoms and shortcomings that your company might have. You may have been choosing to ignore them. If so, it is now time to expose and deal with them, once and for all. It’s time to move beyond.

If you do not recognize any of the symptoms or shortcomings and you feel your company is running well, you may see no need to change. However, you may be missing some prospects.

To help find those missing prospects, the Prescription outlines four proven diagnostic techniques to uncover the “unvarnished” current condition of your company. This is the examination phase. You may be surprised what you will learn.

One of those tools will recommend a look in the mirror, to give you confidence that others see you as you see yourself...or not! A second tool will ask you to get a reading from your customers as to how well your company is doing for them and what they seek going forward. The third tool will lead to a survey for addressing the 6 critical operating functions that drive bottom line performance. And lastly the Prescription will reacquaint you with SWOT which will be used to rank prospects for tasks desired to perk up the company.

These four techniques will complete the diagnosis and give a clear picture of the “current condition” of your company.

The SWOT part of the Process allows participative introspection, a burst of suggestions, and a prioritizing of ideas for the improvement of the company. Strengths will be highlighted with the prospect of building on them. Weaknesses will be revealed and then recorded, without finger pointing or animosity. The Process is eye-opening, yet non-antagonistic.

The knowledge gained will then be applied to drafting GAAMESS and building a PLAN. As a result your team will identify opportunities that will help endear customers as well as employees; reduce costs and increase profitability as long as the Process is maintained. The teams will determine priorities; volunteer to take them on, be committed to complete them and monitor their own performances. Just let them do it! This is the treatment to get healthier.

You might be wondering, “Shouldn’t we be looking at the financials, the monthly P & L and Balance sheet, to help determine the condition of the company?” The answer is “yes” because they may give you general areas of concern like revenues are too low or are going down monthly; profit are dropping, expenses are growing, etc. But these are symptoms.

The financials are a report card on what the company has been doing. It may be good. It may be bad. But no matter what it is, it will not get better by looking at it. Nor will the situation get better by only managing from those numbers. In other words...companies have to change what they have been doing and how they have been doing things and then the financial results will change.

The four diagnostic techniques mentioned above will help explore and then determine what changes are in the best interest of the company,

Some of these explorations may shout “change”. If not, they may just point to “modify”. Whichever it is, Prescription will lead you through a Process to set up a PLAN that should transform or tweak how the company operates. It will introduce you to GAAMESS that will allow many potential enhancements to be taken on and completed. It’s a game changer!

In making changes, every company needs to recognize and embrace which stakeholders come first, second and third. It also needs to know where it is weak, where it is strong; where favorable conditions exist for gaining new customers and where there may be pot holes to avoid. Exploring and expressing these, using some or all of the four diagnostic techniques, creates an open atmosphere and evokes guidelines for initiatives to be developed to serve all stakeholders well. Addressing the stakeholders’ needs as well as the weaknesses and opportunities in a well-developed PLAN will be a major step toward building a new, stronger, more progressive and participative culture.

Like any proposed change, the team needs to accept and support it. A great attribute of the GAAMESS portion of the Prescription Process is the involvement of the team from the onset. The fact that they come up with most all of the initiatives that will be taken on as GOALS, is buy-in from the start!

But that does not absolve you, the leader, from championing the need for change and continually selling the present and future benefits. Change also requires the leadership to cultivate a safe environment that supports transformation. A safe environment is one where constant judgment is not prevalent, open contributions and discourse are embraced and calculated risk taking is acceptable.

In developing a PLAN you will take your knowledge and experience and use it to separate the wheat from the chaff... if your subordinates haven’t done it before you. Before the PLAN is solidified, you will have a chance to review, modify and adjudicate what has been proposed.

So you are not giving up your authority or control. You are just giving your team the chance to become better focused, take on more of the burden and be recognized and rewarded for doing it. In your role as reviewer, coordinator and adjudicator, you will still govern the directions and outcomes (quietly). Your leadership, guidance and support will determine the rate at which your team will adopt these new approaches and the speed of garnering results.

Together the selected, reviewed and...