"...keeping you great" Ten Minutes with the Growth Guy
HEADLINES:
Use your customers' board rooms for quarterly/annual planning -- Elton Swarts, Executive Director of Western Australia Business News, noted in an email to me this week "we have just booked our next two quarterly management team off sites in the boardrooms of two of WA Business News' key clients and invited them to join us for lunch when we break bread. This beats sitting in a hotel room by a country mile, the client is all enthusiastic and the cost to us is half (we organize the catering)...the idea was born from your repeated push for us to talk to our customers." This is an idea many of you can utilize. Gazelles did the same for our planning session, using the board room of a Rockefeller Habits "fan" in Atlanta.
Priorities listed on every door! -- Jack Williams, President of Stone Mountain, GA-based The SURVIS Group,
sent me some photos of the small combination cork and white boards his
30 staff have mounted on their doors for listing their weekly
priorities. He also included pictures of the enlarged copy of two pages
from the "Overview" section in my book that they have displayed in
their main conference room -- a way to remind everyone of the three
"Rockefeller Habits" they've been practicing since June of this year. Here's a link to the photos.
"Change" requires "Stability" -- many of you have
heard me quote Robert "Jake" Jacobs on this point. This is what setting
weekly priorities is doing for The SURVIS Group. Notes Jack Williams
"we've been in the process of transitioning from being a staffing firm
that focused exclusively in the telecommunciations industry (given all
the consolidation in this sector) to an IT Staffing business. As we
diversified, we also began to makes changes in our Associate team based
on the new skill sets required for IT. Some of these new Associates
were young with limited business experience."
Short term laser focus
-- continues Williams "It was obvious that we knew what we wanted to do
and where we wanted to go but there was so much on our to do list that
it seemed we were "shooting up there amongst them" to quote the famous
Southern comedian Jerry Clower. We used this tool to create a short
term laser focus on what needed to be done this week and only this
week. We established 90 day goals as well and the weekly priorities
needed to be in alignment with the quarterly priorities which were
published and posted in our "gathering room"."
Priorities with "teeth"
-- In the beginning, Williams had to make sure that everyone listed
priorities that had teeth instead of some "warm and fuzzy" activities
that would not contribute to the overall transition effort. Explains
Williams "as we continued, getting relevant priorities was no longer an
issue and people began to see the value of the process. We then asked
each person to list one of those priorities as a Commitment. That item
was going to get completed regardless of what occurred. That began to
allow our Associates to really incorporate the concept of tackling the
one item each week that will have the most impact on the business or
their specific area of responsibility."
Focusing tool
-- concludes Williams "this focusing tool has been extremely helpful.
It's kept our team focused on the important and short term things that
we need to accomplish without getting caught up with some of the other
"noise" that surrounds all businesses. We are making steady progress in
our transition steps and hope to have a breakout year in 2008 as we
come out of our transition mode the last half of 2007. It's really
great to see our Associates mark off the items on their list after
they've completed them. It's been a great tool for our newer less
experienced Associates as well to help them understand the discipline
needed to be successful."