In this blog series, Fitness Training for Businesses, I emphasize the need to focus on your whole business model to ensure long-term success. Read Part I and Part II.
In this post, I want to explore the second concern: looking beyond the end results of your business.
How about looking not only at your company’s end results, but also at the behind-the-scenes work that led to those results?
As a business leader, you need to know how the final results that you are looking at came about. Even when you are a big-picture thinker and struggle with detail like I do, you need to understand that this can be a weakness in your management style. How can you celebrate micro-results, efforts, and energies all the way through your business model, when you don’t understand how the end results in front of you came about? How will you guide, encourage, understand, and plan, when you are removed from some of the moving parts?
I challenge you to:
- Emphasize that your business is an integrated system, aligned to a common understanding of a shared purpose. Do this even though your own focus is at a higher level.
- Instill a culture where understanding goes up, down, and side-ways. This will build an incredible understanding of ‘how’ and ‘why’ things are done. This will enrich your team’s ability to make decisions about the future.
- As upper level management, recognize how the moving parts of your business are connected to results. For example, how the combined contributions of different departments lead to business success.
- Review your overall chain of activities, focus and resource allocation. Do not only focus on the last links in the chain. You may be able to shorten the chain to increase efficiency, or get even more out of the existing one.
In Part IV we will look at the third concern about measuring your business performance: intangible results and the role your team members play in achieving them.
