TIME

There are several angles to time management. It could be that you want to personally work less hours, or perhaps you want to increase your productivity and that of your business. 

Keep in mind which of these you particularly want to improve and focus on that. In fact, Focus and avoiding distractions is one of the keys to time efficiency, so let’s start there.

What’s your main focus?

Prioritisation is vital – what’s your main goal? You probably have lots of different goals, but which is the most important this year, this month, this week, today – and in the next hour? 

If you find that difficult to state – imagine how confused your team is? Everyone needs to know their key priority and to be able to achieve it. 

There’s a great book called “The One Thing” by author Garry Keller – it’s worth reading or listening to and applying what it teaches, which is to start with a long list of priorities and narrow it down to The One Thing you MUST get done. 

Remember that if you’re the business owner, you need to focus on doing business owner work, not employee work. There is a difference. You’re there to set the long-term strategy and vision and bring everyone along.

Decisiveness – Making decisions

Are you decisive or a procrastinator? If you have to think about that, you’re probably not decisive! 

In my experience, the speed at which a business can grow is determined largely by it’s leader’s ability to make good decisions quickly. A lot of people think you can either make a quick decision or a good decision and that it has to be one or the other. Not true! 

Make a list of the criteria on which a decision has to be made: It could be the price, the time, certain benefits, etc. Then consider at least three alternatives and score each one against your criteria. The highest score wins! You’ll soon find yourself making great decisions, quickly.

Default Diary

You probably haven’t heard of a Default Diary, it’s a concept that our clients and their teams all tell us has changed their lives. I realise that’s a big claim! 

A default diary is all about creating an outline of your typical week and allocating short, fixed times that you will spend on specific important activities by default. If something gets in the way one week it’s not a big problem, as long as most times you follow the default. 

For example, you might allocate; 

• An hour to update your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• 15 minutes to review your quarterly goals to keep you on track
• Two hours to make follow-up calls
• An hour to proactively call key customers because they’ll appreciate a quick check-in

It’s all about shifting your focus to the Important, rather than the Urgent.

Don’t Do… Delegate!

Everyone I ask already knows “I really need to delegate more…”. The key difference is that consistently successful people DO IT instead of just knowing it. 

In fact, coaching is essentially helping business owners to actually DO what they already know they should do, that being;

• Having a clear vision and sharing it
• Setting clear goals
• Having a business plan
• Delegating everything except true leadership work

Knowing and doing are often worlds apart. Reflect and change what you spend time on and you’ll truly experience a positive shift.

Quick sprints

A great way to get more done is to use quick sprints. In Michael Heppell’s excellent book, Seventeen, he explains the concept of using 17-minute sprints to get things done.

When you only have a limited amount of time, it’s amazing how much you can accomplish. It hit home for me when Michael explained “You know when you’re at work and you’re going on holiday tomorrow… you get absolutely everything done and delegate everything else… achieving in an afternoon what you failed to do in the whole week… So imagine every day that you’re going away tomorrow. Nothing can be left until tomorrow – do it or delegate it. You’ll be amazed at how much you can achieve with this mindset.”

TEAM

When it comes to getting the best out of your team, I know of no better tool than the 7 Keys to a Winning team. Here it is with more detail. Apply it, or even parts of it, and you’ll see a definite change in your team and their results.

1. Strong Leadership

In a single word, the first key to a winning team is leadership. A strong leader is one who demonstrates integrity and competence. He or she is someone who people trust. Strong leaders also have developed the communication skills to enroll and inspire others to understand and embrace their vision. 

It is apparent that for a team to win, they need strong leadership. For your business or department to win, it needs a strong leader. As I coach business owners and management teams, I feel that this is the number one issue that we address.

2. Common Goals

Do you have a clear vision for your business or department? The second key for a winning team is to have a common goal. To win the game as a team, it is essential for everyone to share a clearly defined target, and it is the responsibility of the leader to effectively communicate that goal to the team. 

In the Action Coach world, we speak of the importance of Destination Mastery. A winning team will have a clear Common Goal and plan of action to achieve it. 

The effectiveness of a strong goal is more in what it DOES rather than what it IS. Many people hesitate to set powerful, challenging goals because of a fear of failure. This fear is based on the false belief that the team must respond in disappointment if a goal is not completely realized by the allotted time frame. 

The way to defuse this fear is to logically take it apart. If a common goal brings the team together, gets the team focused, and improves overall performance and team spirit, then why should the team choose disappointment just because they fall short of complete attainment of the goal by a certain deadline? 

The leader needs to encourage the team to instead celebrate the progress and learning that has been attained, followed by the establishment of a new goal. 

The focus should be the progress and the learning and the adjustments that need to be made based on current results. Bigger dreams and goals create better questions, which lead to superior decisions, actions, and results.

So as a strong leader, the challenge is to get with your team, and set a strong, common goal to bring you together. 

3. Rules of the Game

The third key for winning is to know the rules of the game. Can you imagine trying to win a game if you didn’t know the rules? Often employees lack motivation and productivity because the expectations are unclear. 

Do your employees know the company core values? Have you invested time in defining core values and communicating the company culture to every team member?

Once you have a strong leader that has the respect of the team, and a common goal to shoot for, then it is time to define the playing field.

Most people have an inherent resistance to rules. Basically, no one likes to be told by someone else what they can and cannot do. It feels like an infringement on their personal identity and freedom. So with that challenge in mind, let’s talk rules of the game.

If you put rules in the context of a game, they take on a different feel and value. The rules in a game define the game. 

A game with no rules is mayhem, and certainly not too much fun. The rules in a game define how you win, how you succeed, and communicate the appropriate relationship between the team members – their roles and functions defined.

So if you think that defining rules of the game is difficult, consider instead how difficult it is to run a business without doing so.

4. Action Plan

The fourth key to a winning team is to have a written action plan. Great ideas, an inspiring vision, and even a happy workplace doesn’t automatically produce results. Results come from taking action. Each team member needs to know daily who is supposed to do what by when.

You can have a strong leader with a common goal and great, clearly defined rules, but with no action, nothing happens.

Procrastination is the enemy of all progress and learning, and it is rooted in fear. Fear is a paralyzing emotion or expectation about negative outcomes. 

The antidote and cure for fear is action. 

For the action to be most effective, it should be preceded by some organized thought and planning. 

Very simply stated, a great action plan has three components – WHO does WHAT by WHEN. That is it. If you are clear on the goal and the rules, then organize your plan into logical steps, and delegate each step to the right team member. Assign an accountability and deadline, and you are ready to go.

5. Support Risk-Taking 

The fifth key for producing a winning team is to support risk taking. For people to maximize their potential, they need to try new things, even make mistakes! The only people who don’t make mistakes are those who never try anything new. 

Winning teams will always be willing to stretch their limits. As long as you have defined the rules of the game, the team should be encouraged to innovate within those defined boundaries.

To maximize the potential of every team member, the leader and organization must support risk taking. What does that mean? 

It means that fear of mistakes and failure must go. It means that we always solicit and welcome multiple solutions to challenges. 

It means that right brain, creative thinking is encouraged, and that new ideas and changes are welcomed and rewarded. 

It means that good is never good enough, and that continuous improvement, innovation, and experimentation are a fundamental part of the culture.

Do these concepts and ideas scare you? They don’t need to. In fact, rejecting these concepts is truly riskier to the stability of the business or department. A refusal to try new things and make mistakes is a recipe for business and team failure.

6. 100% Inclusion & Involvement 

The sixth key to a winning team is 100% involvement and inclusion. Each member must know that they are accepted by the team, and each member must also choose to participate 100%. Those who are not fully engaged pull down the team’s performance. 

100% participation creates powerful team synergy.

The challenge is to REQUIRE 100% participation from your team. Some of you know that you have team members that need to radically change or leave. Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great”, was asked how to decide if a person should be kept on a team or if they should be asked to leave. He said it is a simple two question test:

1. If the person left today for a better job somewhere else, would you be glad or sad?
2. If this person applied for a job with your organization today, knowing what you know about them, would you hire them?

The answers to those questions provide a clear insight into the action that needs to take place. 100% involvement means that each team member is totally committed to the team and its success. In practical terms, the team member shows up for the game, on time, consistently, ready to perform. 

Each and every member is willing to do what they can do to support the leader and every other member. 100% inclusion means every member of the team is committed to accepting and supporting every single member of team – no member left behind or excluded. 

In other words, the team is lean and mean. It is tight – every member fully engaged and included.

7. Continuous Improvement

Finally, the seventh key to a winning team is continuous improvement. Whatever you and your team learnt, and whatever skills you developed to get you to this point, will not be enough to get you to the next level, either as a business or individually. 

It’s important that every team member has a personal development plan and an action plan for learning.

It’s also good to encourage every team member to keep a record of their learning – the books they read, the courses they complete, all their learning achievements. This way they see the progress and gain further motivation. 

Consider creating a “learning log”, ie a list of books to read and ticking them off, courses attended, webinars attended, online learning and anything else like this. Add things to do, then let each person tick them off when completed. 

This also adds a lot more substance to an annual or bi-annual appraisal when there’s some evidence of learning – or indeed if there isn’t!

MONEY

It’s said that “numbers are the language of business”. So you need to know your numbers.

Key performance indicators

We refer to the most important numbers that you need to know and track as the Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. It’s a common term, Google it if you want to deep-dive on this.

There are KPIs and there are Killer KPIs. The latter are those which are so important that your business will literally die if the numbers are too far off track. The key one of these is cash. You can be making a healthy profit on paper, yet go out of business because you run out of cash! So a cash flow forecast is one of those important KPI-tracking tools you need to use.

Dashboards

Just as in a car we rely on a dashboard to give us an indication of how everything is going at a glance, you need a business dashboard to show you everything in one place and know at a glance if all is OK – or not – so you can take action. 

Graphs showing trends are much more effective in a dashboard than pure numbers that show a snapshot in time. Have your team create a dashboard and each department should update a section – Finance, sales, marketing, Operations, HR… and have the key KPIs from those flow into a top-level dashboard. 

Accept no excuses, create this dashboard and drive your business from it.

Divide to Multiply

Often you can look at top-level numbers and they hide the true information that’s beneath. For example, many businesses see their revenue or profit margin as a single number. This is an average and hides what’s actually happening. 

If you were to break that number down – divide it into, say, five product categories or five geographic regions or whatever else makes sense in your business – you would see vital information. 

One of those five is the worst performer! Fix it or cut it out! One of those five is the best performer… put more focus on it or see what you can learn to apply to the others.

Legacy Goals

Congratulations on receiving a score of 100%. Because of this, you have unlocked our hidden focus area of Legacy Goals.

WHAT ARE LEGACY GOALS?

Your business’ legacy is the impact it will make on its culture, community, and customers after you have either sold or passed on your business to someone else. The day-to-day actions of you and your business will be the foundations on which the legacy is built.

HOW TO START THINKING ABOUT LEGACY GOALS?

It starts with a long-term mindset. Define what matters and make sure that you have long-term visions that match it. That vision will form your business’ legacy goals.

All decisions, all product development, all marketing campaigns will relate back to the vision, which is related to what matters most to your business legacy.

Goal setting is an important part of building a business legacy. By setting goals, you’ll define your path and also have a benchmark to compare your progress. Here are some things to keep in mind when you’re setting these goals:

• Each goal must tie back to the vision of the legacy you want to build
• Goals must be descriptive, specific, and measurable to be effective

Although legacy can vary depending on whether you are looking at yourself, your business, or your industry, the goal is the same––make an impact that stands the test of time.

EXIT

When we speak to most business owners they don’t have a plan for when their business will be finished. We don’t mean finished in a bad way, we mean when will it be at a stage when it’s working on automatic like a well-oiled machine.

Let me give you a different example. Imagine you’re building a house, but you don’t have a plan for how it will look when it’s finished.

You tell the architect “Just build me a lounge, kitchen, bathroom and a couple of bedrooms and let’s see how it goes. If it goes well, I might add some more bedroom and maybe a second floor.”.

Can you imagine what it would be like to work on that project. No blueprint, no idea when the project will be finished, no idea how many people will be required, what materials are needed… chaos! Yet people build businesses like this every day!

With no plan for where it’s going or how long it will take.

Whether you want to be able to sell your business, or to put in a manager and be able to work as little as you choose or not at all… you’ll do far better with a plan and timescale. We’ve seen that a business can go from wherever it currently is to sale or working without the owner in three to five years.

Yet with no such plan, it just keeps on going and going, whether it’s growing or not, with no particular urgency.

Until something forces urgency – whether that be market conditions such a recession, the threat of new technology or working habits or, unfortunately, ill health.

We regularly work with business owners to help them create a plan and know when the business can work without them.

You’d be amazed at how quickly things reach the goal when there’s a clear plan and a timescale.

When will your business building be finished?