Low hanging fruit

Sometimes we are urged to pick the low-hanging fruit - to make changes which result in relatively easy wins.

Of course this helps ... but you have to go beyond that and start to do the hard work to reach the higher-hanging fruit.

Always picking the low-hanging fruit is too easy ... and too limiting. It will never give you the real breakthrough in performance that more concerted effort and action can achieve.

Most Important

What's the most important factor for your business - the really 'critical to success' factor you absolutely must get right?

Is this the factor you focus your attention on?

If not, surely something is wrong.

Make sure you know what this factor is (and the 'runners up').  And make sure these are top of your agenda at every board meeting, management meeting ... and waking day!

Olympic performance

This is an Olympic year. Whole groups of sportsmen and women will be aiming for personal medals ... and even those outside of the medal chances will be aiming for personal best performances. Have you though about ways in which you could get your employees to strive for 'Olympic performance' during the build up to, and hopefully after, the Games. Perhaps you could organise competitions, targets - even medals - for groups of employees .. preferably aligning them with 'real', Olympic events. If the alignment can be based on some attribute of the product or process, so much the better ... but an event could be taken at random - preferably one that lasts some time with heats, semi-finals and a final.

What should I do?

Do you have written procedures for the work tasks in your organisation. "Not me", I hear you say, "Much too bureaucratic and inflexible". Unfortunately, what you say is often true ... but it needn't be so. Written procedures can be brief, structured , clear and definitely non-bureaucratic. ... but they should help people know what is expected of them - in terms of what they are supposed to do, how they are supposed to do it ... and to what effect. Next time you ring up a 3rd party organisation and are left in 'telephone tag' or some other web of delay, just think how much easier it would be if the answerer knew what to do - and so did you. Clarity of task is a key underpinning of high performance.