…if you can’t even find 1 minute to read this
Excluding literal machines with conveyor belts and fancy gadgets, we see a glaring gap companies could patch, in their quest for more productive humans.
If you are anything like us, you love a bit of productivity pudding.
But just like any dessert, too much of a good thing can lead to, um diabetes?
The trap to be aware of: when the effort to make your career or company the leanest machine in the industrial complex becomes, well... counterproductive.
Sure…
Lean can kill those little gaps where good ideas used to spark.
Or make the biz so focused on fixing the present way of doing things it does not gear up for big changes coming in the future.
But the day-to-day grind is still the issue we want to address.
The truth is, sometimes productivity does not require the perfect implementation of a system boasting its own TED talk.
The word you’re looking for is “clarity”.
If you don't know what you're doing, why you're doing it, who you are doing it for, how close you are to being "there" yet, and who is supposed to be in charge of what… good luck being productive!
Chaos Ensues
Management teams need to first make sure they know the answers to these questions, and then make sure their teams know, because technology has come a long way but still has not given the masses telepathic communication.
Instead of zooming towards the targets with a joyous team culture, you will be lumped with endless email chains, missed deadlines, job double-ups, and meetings planning for a meeting about a meeting.
Nobody will know the real objective to the meeting-meetings but will say nothing in case they are the only ones who don't know.
Lack of clarity often finds its roots in lack of strategy.
Things like:
Not knowing your competitive advantage. By the way, if you wrote down yours somewhere, but still worry about what the competition is/n’t doing; or you fret about not having enough market share to go around, you did it wrong.
Not doing regular start/stop/keeps as a team, which means people instead use areas to procrastinate the real priorities, or just straight-up do not know to prioritize income-producing activities. Teach your teams which parts of their job role are income producing so they know how to eat that frog! There is immense power in saying no to things. “No” to the client who keeps withholding payment and is a kill-joy to work with will free you up to communicate with 3 prospects you would love to do business with. “No” to the filing which a temp could do means 2 hours of telemarketing calls. “No” to putting pretend shadows under each product in your 300-page catalogue means “yes” to creating a weeks’ worth of social media graphics. The point: if you try to say yes to everything, you will end up in all sorts of chaos. Start doing regular start/stop/keeps with the team as well as 1-to-1.
Not teaching people how to use your preferred systems. CRMs, scheduling software, even ironically, internal comms software… Giving people a login is not enough if it means their inbox will become so cluttered with notifications, they start missing the important ones, too.
People not wanting to tread on each other’s professionally shod toes, so instead of one person taking ownership of an important task, it waits moons. This can happen anywhere on the org chart. Stop creating vague job titles and start giving people set roles, descriptions and processes. Look at whether a person is more naturally a starter, finisher, organiser or implementer; and adjust the leadership and roles of a department accordingly.
Why did we boldly claim what you shouldn’t hire a lean consultant to fix your productivity if you can’t even find the time to read this?
Because any team in that state is highly likely in the grips of reactivity.
They cannot be proactive because they are not clear on where they are going, why they are going there, and how they are getting there!
If you made the time to read this far, then you deserve part two.
Part two includes examples of what each department of business might look like if you are running a reactive business, so you can identify whether you need a dose of clarity in your own company.
Then some basic steps of how to begin turning this around.
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