DO YOU HAVE TOO MANY BUSINESS GOALS?

Worse, are you overwhelmed by your business goals?

If so, Jeff Whittle’s observations will help clarify your focus. His advice is to dumb down your business goals…literally. This excerpt from his recent contribution to the EOSWorldwide blog explains more:

“Simplicity is the antidote to complexity, and it isn’t easy to achieve. When you find yourself drowning in a plate of unachieved goals, remember the truism attributed to Albert Einstein – if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

I can promise that your business will never, ever suffer from a lack of things to be done. What it will suffer from, however, is a lack of focus and execution on the very critical few things that – if achieved – will have the biggest impact on your business. Identifying those critical few things, and then staying focused on their achievement, is the difference between great companies and floundering ones.

Here’s the key question: can you (and everyone else on your team) simply state the 3-5 most important things that you must achieve this quarter? If you can’t, you’re carrying around that plate of goals and action items that almost certainly will not get achieved for the simple reason that there are too many of them for any of them to be true priorities. Until you simplify the goals of any period down to a critical few, you will remain stuck, your tires helplessly spinning in the muck of business complexity.”

Read his full article: Too Many Business Goals Is a Very Bad Thing.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU'RE A GREAT BOSS

Do you ask your employees questions?  By that, I mean the “why, who, what, where, and when” ones. If not, you may not be the best boss you can be. That can impact more than your employees’ morale. It can hurt your bottom line.

Rene Boer — a certified EOS Implementer in the Chicago area — recently published an insightful post for the EOS blog about that topic. An excerpt:

“If you’re like most bosses, you do most of the talking. Frankly, this one-way-street behavior needs to change. Your job is to ensure that the dialogue is 80/20, where your direct report is doing 80% of the talking and you’re talking only 20% of the time. The only way to make that happen is to ask questions instead of making statements.”

You can read his complete article here: Why Great Bosses Don't Tell You What To Do.

THE POWER OF WHY

Why is it so tough to get to the root of hard business problems?  We see breakdowns and problems every day. Somehow, we know there must be some way to solve and prevent them.  Everyone involved gets frustrated and confused at different levels.

In Eric Ries article, “To Get To The Root Of A Hard Problem, Just Ask"Why" Five Times”, he explains companies move too fast to correct mistakes and usually don’t react until those mistakes become a large enough to impede success for the company.  Another reason is because managers believe it’s not worth their time to deal with the small issues. 

However, as Ries points out, once you get to the point where you can’t ignore the problem, the best way to resolve it is to ask the "5 Why's".  Toyota has used this process very effectively. 

It’s good to call a time out and resolve problems at their roots.  It’s even better to have a disciplined and systematic way of dealing with nonstop issues.  In order to have them captured in a timely manner, the company's leadership needs to endorse open, honest and safe communications around reporting problems. Then employees will feel free to report issues and why they believe the issues exists.  Once issues are clear, good teamwork and accountability will help them to be resolved forever.  For more details about how to powerfully prevent and resolve issues in your company, go to EOS Worldwide.