Consistently average. Really?
Do you want to be a high performing organization? Then it would be best if you were consistently average.
The key to becoming a successful business is being consistent. Consistent in the service you provide, the product you supply, and your outcome and performance.
Why would you want that as our focus?
It’s like building a house. We need to ensure that we’ve got excellent foundations. And we want the foundations to be able to hold the same weight from one side to the next. We want the same quality from one side to the next. So having a consistent solid foundation is vital.
7 prime examples of what is needed to have a solid foundation in business are:
• Integrated systems
• Integrated processes
• Culture
• High performing people
• Do you have consistently everyone engaged from a value and vision perspective?
• Market strategy
• Do you have a consistent social response to corporate responsibility strategy?
• Is everyone consistently performing? Or is your business full of high performers and low
performers?
Furthermore, is your HR team giving consistent advice across the board, or are they focusing on one rather than all topics? For example, is your HR team focused on workplace injury rather than injury prevention?
I liken it to going to a surgeon. I would rather see a consistently average surgeon every day of the week. Why? As I know that doing a good job will always be consistent.
1)They will always follow the procedures.
2)They will always treat their team well (whereas an exceptional surgeon may be great one day but
average the next).
If consistently average is the goal, how do we achieve this consistency?
For a start, it is about documenting our policies and procedures and then having training and upskilling associated with it.
It also ensures that your sales team has a documented end-to-end sales process?
It is about knowing who your market is and how to get there. Do you know how many client meetings you need to get a conversion? Do you have the same templates that you send to every client? Do you have a follow-up strategy? Do you have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and is all your information stored in the CRM?
Does the tools, systems and processes have an end to end process from a sales perspective?
We recently worked with a client with over 1,000 staff, but they had severe and significant complex cases. There was none when we asked to look at their performance management procedure and training. They had great HR managers. However, there was no consistent process for the managers to follow as there was no training for the managers. Our solution to this situation was to develop a policy and procedure for performance management. We then developed training for the managers and then rolled this training out, so we could have consistent people management across the entire organization.
The outcome was consistent management for everyone. There was reduced bullying and workplace harassment. Everyone was now engaged because processes were implemented and followed consistently.
Another client we worked with did not have any annual performance coaching conversation (actually, they had no performance reviews). So, depending on the skill set of the current executive director depended on how engaged and competent their teams were.
So, where the executive director was highly competent at engaging their teams, coaching and mentoring them, you had a high performing team. Where the executive director wasn’t good at coaching, mentoring and upskilling, the team wasn’t as good and wasn’t as high performing and wasn’t as engaged.
To help this situation, we developed a coaching conversation framework and rolled it out across the organization. We upskilled the managers to be able to have annual performance conversations. The result was a consistent coaching conversation framework across the
organization, with consistently trained managers who had a timeframe for these conversations. The result was a re-engaged workforce because they were having coaching conversations about how they were performing, where they wanted to be, and how the manager could manage them more effectively. And the outcome was increased productivity, performance and engagement across the organization.
So this is the reason why consistently average the key.