4 Essential checks to make before you jump

When businesses are not performing to expectation there are often a number of significant pressures to act from both external and internal stakeholders. Customers can be vociferously or perhaps even visibly demanding improvement or worse, voting with their feet. Internal stakeholders can rightly be demanding of change. Our teams can be demotivated, demoralised, despondent or distancing themselves by leaving. It’s time to act.

Yes, but decisive action requires a small number of simple steps to ensure we are acting rationally, consciously and effectively and with focus on the important areas that will make a tangible, lasting difference to our performance.

If this sounds difficult or perhaps sounds time consuming, it can be as simple as the steps we would take to cross the road. These four essential steps make up a process taught to us as children to keep us safe when crossing the road and its equally as relevant and important in embarking on any journey.

1. STOP

It may sound counterintuitive and indeed, in most circumstances, the pressures to make a transformational change may urge if not demand action. However, whilst it is important to take action, it is also important that it is the right action. There are many stories of initiative fatigue. It took time for your business to get into the position it is in, both the good and the not so good of the circumstances you find yourself in are the result of considerable investment. 

An investment in transforming your business has to start with critical evaluation of the current business context, the markets both in terms of customers and competitors and how you position yourselves now and in the future. In this context taking stock openly and honestly of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats is a simple and often cathartic step. It is also important to review, re-evaluate and perhaps revisit your vision and objectives.

“Even after the greatest defeats, the depressing thought of being a failure is best combated by taking stock of all your past achievements”

(Hans Selye)

2. LOOK

Critically evaluating your business position will require taking time to review your performance. This may involve a comprehensive review of financial performance, sales pipeline, product performance, capabilities or footprint and infrastructure.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes”

(Marcel Proust)

3. LISTEN

When embarking, or considering embarking, on a transformational journey for your business, it is important to recognise you have to take the organisation with you. An important step in the journey is to listen to the people around you. To actively seek, listen and digest the views of individuals and collectively of teams and groups will give important insight. Insight into both collective and individual views on all aspects of performance.

As well as providing invaluable insight into many aspects of your business and its performance, listening will also afford an opportunity to really understand what makes your business “tick”, the formal and informal networks, the likes and the dislikes and an insight into the culture of the business.

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply” (Stephen Covey)

4. MOVE FORWARD

Having taken the time to critically evaluate business performance, re-evaluate and perhaps even refresh the vision, objectives and direction of the business, critically evaluated performance through the lenses of the various Key Performance Indicators across the Customer, Financial and Operational landscape and sought out, understood and assimilated the views of the people in your business, it is time to act with conviction.

Acting requires the engagement and mobilisation of the whole team to take the necessary, positive and decisive steps identified that will move the business forward; to “lean in” to the challenge ahead as we discussed in my previous article here.

 With a clear view of the current market, your competition and your position as well as a distilled understanding of the current operational performance and how your teams view the business, you are in a much more informed position to identify, agree and importantly engage on a considered, deliberate and focussed plan of action to transform your business.

This plan needs to be developed, critiqued, crystallised into clear, simple messages and shared with the people in your business. Not just shared such that they can criticise, understand or appreciate but shared in a manner that inspires engagement, buy-in, ownership and true focussed delivery of the actions necessary to truly take your business forward.

"People acting together as a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could ever hope to bring about"

(Franklin D Roosevelt)

Gavin Armstrong helps engineering, manufacturing, infrastructure businesses transform and develop their products, programmes and performance.

This article was first published as a GAPRO insight here.