If you consider your organisation like an ongoing project, you need a good set of tools to make it happen.
This time we focus on three of them which are those without whom nothing can move forward.
Everybody needs to look in the same direction
If we deep dive on what makes a team excel, among many subjective points, one stands as a clear distinctive one: having a shared vision.
A shared vision doesn’t mean that exploring different options is prohibited, but means that, whatever we do, people need to aim at same target and, possibly, to common values: business life is enough complex to be able to allow our organisation members to pursuit personal agendas not aligned with a common approach.
Obtaining a shared vision and then going through transforming it into objectives allows us to “aim at the same target” with homogeneity of intentions, actions and a final result.
Unfortunately this trait doesn’t come out of the pocket, but requires a continuous check and several adaptive actions; this process is done through a continuous analysis and fine tuning aimed at aligning the approach and communicating to teams.
Is not enough that “generally speaking”, the actions are known, but every member needs to be on the same page: failure in doing so results either in losing people during the journey or losing the target at the end, plus an extra effort to drive the rest of the organisation where we as managers want to go in line with wider company targets.
This approach can be pursued in several ways, but the easiest one is by sharing clearly at individual and team level short, medium and long-term goals so not to leave space to any confusion.
Time is costly and requires a continuous focus
Second point concerns one of the factors that are scarce by definition: time. The reflection on time is very broad and does not only concern its management, but also processes that consume a lot of it and which are perhaps no longer efficient: conference calls, meetings, drafting texts, bureaucratic activities, are just some examples of what typically takes away this precious resource in a company and defines where we need to look at.
As a team and as a manager it is important to ask ourselves critically what has become a “time stealer” from time to time. The answer could also take time and lead to a profound rethinking of activities because it is not at all certain that how has been organised for some time and also applies to changed contexts.
And this is something really relevant: do it once and you loose your time, do it recursively and you are on the good path: there’s something to optimize until the very last day!
We need a plan
The last point to consider relates to planning. I’ve been saying it for a long time, without an adequate level of planning, loss of efficiency and failure are reasonably certain. One lesson that comes from experience, sometimes hard-learned, is that ten minutes of planning could save us some hours of unfocused effort. Regular planning on a daily basis, at the beginning or end of the day, can help us move through the day in a more focused way, not wasting energy and keeping the progress of activities under control.
