2010, Where to Start

2010, Where to Start

The start of a new year often triggers a sense of optimism within management teams.  We give ourselves permission to start to forget the pains and struggles of the previous year and look with hope to the potential of the coming year. 

How do you translate this optimism into performance?  Where do you start?  Following are three strategies that I have watched skilled leaders use to achieve desired performance outcomes.

Make sure you are taking care of your best customers

They are the foundation for a successful year.  Find out what they are thinking and feeling, and be committed to implementing the actions needed to strengthen their loyalty.  Look for ways to surprise and delight them.  Thank them for their business.  Stay close to them.

Leverage what you are doing well

What segments of your business are running well?  Identify them and figure out ways to leverage them to improve business performance.  Not doing so will lead to missed opportunity.  Doing so can mean reduced costs, improved profitability, increased market share or more loyal employees and customers. 

Become smarter about getting new customers

Never lose this focus.  It must always be a top priority. Take the time to figure out what is and isn’t working well with your current go-to-market strategy.  Don’t kid yourself into believing that simply putting more pressure on your existing sales process and sales teams will improve performance.  It won’t.  Becoming smarter at getting new customers often requires a detailed and honest look at your entire go-to-market strategy and a willingness to change it when it needs to be changed.

Missing the Mark

Which is more important – what business strategy you implement or how well you implement the strategy?  The correct answer is that both are equally important.  Why then, are so many companies still failing to understand this? 

Unfortunately, I think it's because businesses are under increasing pressure to act quickly and are allowing themselves to be lulled into believing that a strong business strategy will succeed simply because it’s a strong strategy.  It will only be effective if the people responsible for implementing it at all levels of the organization understand it, buy into it and know their role in making it successful.  Taking short cuts and not properly engaging and preparing these people for success will simply lead to failure and “missing the mark”.

Why Companies "Stall"

During the last couple of weeks I have had some interesting conversations with business leaders who felt like their companies had stalled.  Their management teams seemed unable to think beyond their day-to-day responsibilities and were demonstrating little desire or drive to pro-actively think about the future of the business.

Why does this happen?  Who is responsible?  The quick answer is that senior leadership is usually responsible because it isn’t leading as it should be.  Here are a couple of examples of how this happens.

• Senior leadership micro-manages and second guesses its management team.  For some reason it loses trust in the team’s ability to do its job and, as a result, concentrates energy on asking questions about what is being done and challenging decisions that are being made.  Leadership focuses its efforts on managing its managers instead of leading them.
• Senior leaders send mixed signals about the future and/or don’t seek input from management team members about what the future could look like.  One day the company is going in one direction and another the next day.  This produces confusion and skepticism about the future and leads to complacency from management team members.
• Senior leaders are overly conservative and risk averse, causing their management teams to act the same way.  Why think pro-actively about the future when you know the most conservative path will always be taken?

The upside of effectively leading and engaging management teams around the future success of a company is significant.  To do so, senior leadership must be willing to honestly look at its actions and make needed changes to better lead and motivate its management team towards that future.