6 ways to make Your Company Super Efficient

6 ways to make Your Company Super EfficientWhat I’ve seen in companies, efficiency needs regular maintenance. Things need to be moving and changes are required to keep the minds fresh and interested. If nothing changes, everything deteriorates along with the motivation.

This is my short and simple recipe for maintaining company efficiency.

1. Keep the number of managers small.

You don’t need management, you need leadership and leadership has nothing to do with the management.

The common mistake is to combine management and leadership. If you have great leaders, why do you make them to do management tasks?

Reviewing invoices, vacations and all the other crap. Let leaders lead and hire managers for management work.

Anyway, the more managers you have the more scattered the decision making is. The more scattered it is, the more dependencies you will have, more own agendas you will see and the decision making in turn will be slower.

Bad or average managers block genuine leadership and will always conflict influencers. The best leaders I have seen are usually influencers that lead without any kind of position. Best ideas and best drive comes from the influencers, linchpins or intrapreneurs.

The best managers do everything they can to support these guys and to make them feel appreciated.

Managers make decisions (if they do decisions at all!) about work, where they are rarely the experts. More than once  I have seen managers to bypass the real experts, who at the end will do the work. If the people who are the experts in their work can’t help in decisions that relate to their own area of expertise, you have done something wrong. Either your are not listening, or your have hired the wrong experts.

So, reduce managers and let leaders and influencers rise. Listen to the ones that will do the work. And I emphasize! Listen the ones that will DO the work. Not the ones, that will just TALK.

2. Have clear goal.

Have a crystal clear goal and combine the actions to the goal. Goal cannot be just a slogan. The goal must be so clear, that everyone understands what is the goal of the company. Remind about the goal constantly.

The goal can’t be a set of goals. It must be one.

Cynics will say that there is no other goal than make money, but there must be. Your employees won’t usually get more money, even if the owners and top management does. How engaging it can be to collect money for others?

The money is the side effect that will follow if the goal is met.

3. Reduce the cycle time.

If you allow projects to go on, you are already in inefficiency state. If projects are big, then you need to split them. Allowing projects that last months, or even worse years, is disastrous path.

If you can’t reach goals in shorter time, take smaller steps that all have real outcomes.

Reduce the cycle time constantly.

4. Eliminate discussions with predetermined rules

If you need to discuss same things all the time again and again it is time to set rules that you follow.

There is nothing more annoying than having the same discussion several times. Sometimes, it passes without noticing, because the people having the discussion change. Let’s say that you have – again – a manager that needs to accept something. Everyone, making the request needs to have discussion with the manager.

First of all think, does the acceptance phase bring any value. If it does, set rules that the requester needs to follow – and you don’t need to discuss with the manager anymore. Perhaps acceptance stage and manager will become obsolete, if people take the responsibility and get rewarded for following the rules.

Rules can be developed, improved or changed – but they must be followed.

5. List everything you do and start dropping things

List all actions that you do and start actively dropping them. Everything that does not support your goals or make reaching your goals easier is unnecessary. Remove, combine and automate.

Even the smallest things you do are eating your time. It is dangerous to think that small things do not matter and you can keep doing unnecessary small things because – “oh – it is just a such a small thing. I can do it, even if it does not make sense, because it is such a SMALL thing.”

Small things make the difference for good and bad. Small things build big things.

6. Prefer actions with tangible results

Prefer actions that have tangible results. Actions that will have outcomes that will be in use. Everything that is not in use or visible has no value.

Studies are nice, proof of concepts are good, new tools are fun, but all of them are worthless if they are not in use.

Aim always for work that has outcome that is more than real.

..

If every single person in your company thought how the work they are doing could be obsoleted your company would become super efficient.

I understand the paradox. Why anyone would want to make their own work obsolete? There is always work, that will never become obsolete, but everyone has tasks that are only mandatory evil.

If your work becomes obsolete, it is time to take it to the next level. Your company must be mature enough to offer the next level for everyone.

 

Photo Credir Flickr tropicalLiving

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