Finding Greater Potential

July 20, 2023
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Welcome to a Tacticware Business Systems educational article. At Tacticware we focus on growing enterprises, teams, and competitive advantage. The result is financial predictability.

Our topic in this article is about expanding the capacity of management teams and finding greater potential in business.

This article is available for free download at tacticware.com.

Finding Greater Potential

Entrepreneurs generally have a grand vision. Typically, the vision begins on the back of a napkin, between dreams in the middle of the night, or over a beverage with like minded friends. Suddenly, the vision explodes into a brand.

The magic of the brand evolves into a small organization. Managers, employees, and even customers contribute to shaping the brand. Sales grow, products or services increase, and the company expands its footprint. The small organization becomes a medium-sized organization with many employees and customers.

Employees establish feelings about the company and its management. These feelings establish perception and form a cultural environment. The cultural environment communicates a relationship and level of quality to every customer with each transaction.

Customer loyalty is built on the success of each transaction. Healthy cultures greatly contribute to the value of customer relationships. In fact, they contribute to competitive advantage.

Until it Doesn’t

Entrepreneurial spirit drives the organization until it doesn’t. Entrepreneurial spirit is slowly negated by daily challenges and structural deficiencies as the business grows. Incredible effort and long hours by management maintains the organization but fails to significantly grow the organization.

The business has exceeded the capacity of the management team. This is the time where finding greater potential begins with valuing and embracing business systems in management, culture, and strategy

Leadership

Leadership and management do not share like job definitions. Leaders are stewards of the organization, its employees, and products. They facilitate and enforce the vision statement and core values.

Effective managers, on the other hand, are focused on the mission. They achieve objectives by facilitating the efforts of employees. They work within the boundaries of the mission and company core values. Effective managers are instrumental in deploying their organizational skills and execution.

Not everyone can be a great visionary. Highly effective managers are sometimes not outstanding visionaries. Sometimes leaders are not suited to be effective managers. By not understanding the difference we limit our potential.

Finding greater potential within yourself and the organization begins with understanding business systems and processes. Quality systems and processes establish structure and perception. They contribute to the basic human needs of trust and respect.

Effective leaders value and enforce systems and processes. They work diligently to eliminate random acts of poor judgement, silos, and unfortunate behaviors by the organization. Most importantly, systems and processes focus on the source of challenges rather than symptoms.

Culture

Cultural systems manage the boundaries and perception of both management and employees. The 360 cultural system assesses the cultural health and values of a business.

High-capacity business cultures generally support three conditions.

  1. Quality Team
  2. Job Security
  3. Competitive Compensation and Benefits

Here’s what these three conditions mean to you.

1. Employees want and expect a quality team environment. Inconsistency, dysfunction, unequal performance accountability, and inadequate management practices do not support a quality team.

The fact is most employees leave a job because of inconsistencies and behaviors in their manager or organization rather than the job.”

2. Employees want a permanent career and home. Job changes are disruptive and stressful for the employee. Management threats and inconsistent job security ultimately lead to attrition by even the best employees. Today, employees will not live in fear or in a world of retaliation in a tight job market.

Companies with continuous layoffs are victims. It’s the absence of leadership.

3. Employees want to receive fair compensation and benefits. If the business culture is poor and filled with threats, no amount of compensation will retain a quality employee. Businesses with excessive employee attrition should first review their culture and business practices to determine the source of the attrition rather than increase their compensation.

Deliverables

Culture impacts the success of the CEO downward to maintenance employees. Quality cultures simply achieve more objectives. They efficiently execute the strategy and tactics necessary to achieve the goal. In fact, a quality culture contributes to employee and customer retention. And they allow potential leaders to become and remain leaders.

Customers expect quality, service, and value at a level of 100%, not 80%. Customer perception is influenced by employee perception. Average is inconsistent in business world. Customer loyalty depends on the company delivering predictable and sustainable deliverables.

It’s always interesting to assess company culture and discover cultural health and customer retention share like metrics. When we benchmark cultural metrics, we can establish solutions and goals for improving our cultural health.

Quality cultures retain customers because of employee care and attention. The business avoids being on the hamster wheel of attrition. That’s why effective leaders place so much value in their cultural dynamics.

Strategy

Strategy is a plan to achieve a goal. Strategy systems identify opportunities, challenges, and risk. Strategy building clarifies the goals and critical thinking of the management team and senior leadership.

Leaping on a goal and the supporting objectives without due diligence is characteristic of enterprises without genuine systems and processes.

“The purpose of strategy is not how to accomplish a goal, but rather should the company even pursue the goal.”

It’s great to have a grand vision, and we need more grand visions. Unfortunately, executing a grand vision without strategic planning damages team,  job security, and compensation. Employees see failure and dysfunction as a threat to job stability and compensation.

Summary

The overarching question for the reader is, why would a customer want to consistently purchase from your organization? I suggest it begins with quality leadership, culture, and strategy as the foundation for success.

Article Author

Paul R. Fournier is President of Tacticware Business Systems. Tacticware offers business systems in Management, Culture, and Strategy.

Our expert resources include management systems, management courses, executive coaching, and 360 Cultural Organizational Assessments. We provide guidance to clients globally. Learn more about transforming your business by contacting us.

Equal Opportunity

We do not discriminate against racial, gender, ethnic, religious groups, older workers, veterans, and people with disabilities. As a matter of policy, we remain apolitical, religion neutral, and respectful of local customs.

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