You May Want to Ask Yourself These Questions:

• How do we establish or reestablish trust? Are you ready to improve and add extra strength to the back-bone of your organization?
• How do our people communicate? How can we really improve communication, goal setting and execution so our people and departments GET RESULTS and we actually utilize all of our resources, people and departments as a UNIFIED whole toward specific objectives.
• Where are we now and where do we all want to go? How can each member of our organization help to improve our bottom line and why should they?
• Is any of this even possible?
• If someone told me it was, would I believe them?
• If I did believe them would I take the two  minutes out of my busy day and do anything about it? would I call, text or email?

Profit from the inside out. I specialize’s in designing employee development programs tailored specifically for your staff and you. I provide you with the necessary training and tools to ensure that your staff continues to teach itself, monitor itself, and show improved results long after I have left.

Are you getting the best out of your employees? If not, then take steps to improve your organization by investing in an employee development program.

Make no mistake about it: all your closest competitors have good R & D… They have access to financing and resources, and they are training their people. The only resource which separates you from your closest competitors is… YOUR PEOPLE… SO INVEST IN THEM EFFECTIVELY.

All organizational challenges will ultimately be solved by and through your people! Whether your challenges are technical, financial, or in some other domain, these challenges will always hinge on human communications and processes. Understanding and improving communication is hugely important to your organization’s survival and success, because the bottom line is: it’s YOUR people who will ultimately take YOUR organization to the next level.

Important considerations for employee development:

• Urgency and energy are produced to create a new future.
• Broad participation quickly identifies performance gaps and their solutions, improving productivity and customer satisfaction.
• First tackle the larger issues or conflicts that are tying up your organization’s time and effectiveness.
• Alleviate stress and you emphasize camaraderie.
• Employee morale will soar higher and stay more consistently positive through employee development; when employee’s morale is high, areas of need will be addressed more quickly and effectively, so problems won’t fester under the surface and get out of control.
• Encouraging employee feedback on business challenges will help people grasp issues.
• Employees will become aligned around a common purpose and will create new directions, because they understand both the difficulties and the opportunities of change and growth. In short, employee development creates “ownership.”
• Lastly, it is virtually impossible to have satisfied customers and dissatisfied employees. Everyone knows when a clown has makeup on and your customers know it when your employees are faking the smiles. So quit insulting them, because in this competitive age they WILL shop you.

In essence, when employees realize that they have some semblance of control and are being heard, the company, the leadership, and the employees all benefit. Thus, it is through this improved communication and shared purpose that the value of employee development truly begins to sink in for all stakeholders. This is when your team will take your organization to the next level. Through employee development, you are guaranteed lasting commitment and support of your strategic plan and your company vision! Kelly@InternalBusinessSolutions.com

Whether I call it a strategic plan for larger organizations or a plan of attack for smaller mom and pop businesses, the foundational elements are the same. Having a clear plan on where your business is going and how to successfully and consistently achieve goals, so that all of your employees, managers and leadership fully understand their respective duties on how to get there, is paramount. The most pivotal aspect of this entire process rests on the ability of leadership and every employee under them to implement the strategic plan so that actions, statements, and behaviors result in improved conditions at all levels within your organization. When this takes place, your internal and external customers will benefit greatly and your competitors will try to emulate; resulting in your leading and your competitors following.

In my experience, however, working with National and International companies, approximately 95% of them have strategic plans, but only 3 to 7 % implement them consistently and effectively; most of these beautifully made documents start collecting dust after a mere 4-6 weeks after their launch. For example, and this represents the majority, not the minority; I had one President share with me that his organization had just completed a yearlong, mid-six-figure, strategic plan creation project; and it was a work of art housed in a leather bound embossed casing. However, when I asked him what he intended to do with it, he replied with a deer-in-the-headlights expression, “I don’t know.” Many of the problems surrounding implementation don’t stem from lack of trying, but rather from lack of understanding. Company leadership either believes the creation of the plan is enough and implementation will automatically take care of itself, or they confuse general strategic plan knowledge with the processing of the plan. In other situations, I have found they have gathered inaccurate information or no information at all, which they base their strategic plan on. Successful strategic plan implementation requires that your leadership team have skills, knowledge and experience, which creates competency when faced with follow-through.

A plan will not and cannot do anything but suggest a way to go; its a map. It does not promote ACTION. People promote action but usually don’t know what actual steps they need to take next because it requires them to do and be different than who and what they were 5 days before and leadership doesn’t know how to help model new behaviors. There are a lot of steps and stages that must be taken and met for a strageic plan can do you and your organization any good. The first step in this process is to determine if everyone on the leadership team and then within the organization knows about the plan, understands the plan and then knows what steps THEY must take to help implement the plan. This quick and easy assessment will help you determine how well the plan is understood.

Leadership Team Competency

These questions will help you and your team discover if you are ready to implement your strategic plan or if you must slow down and make sure everyone knows what the objectives are and their place in helping the company achieve those objectives. So many times I witness leadership going in one direction only to turn around and watch the rest of the company heading off in an entirely different direction–strange but, unfortunately very true.

Now for the assessment:  For ease of wording I use the term “leaders.” I suggest you mentally use all people of authority in your organization including executives, supervisors, directors, managers, assistant managers and so forth. I suggest you use a 0-5 Lickert Scale, where zero means “none of the leaders” and five means “all the leaders.”

1. Your leaders understand the strategic plan and are able to successfully set department goals in support of the strategy?
2. Your leaders lead meetings in which strategic issues are discussed in relation to operations?
3. Your leaders, if asked, could provide a priority list of issues directly related to strategy implementation for which they are responsible?
4. Your leaders set their subordinates’ goals and objectives according to the strategic goals that relate to their operations?
5. Your leaders evaluate, reward, and promote their people with strategic goals in mind?

Working Hard vs Working Smart

Working hard is needed, but working smart is required and nothing is more important to business success than working toward a specific destination and making sure you and your team have the fundamental skills, knowledge and competency to create and implement a useful strategic plan. For additional information on any or all of this material, please contact Kelly@InternalBusinessSolutions.com so we can schedule an appointment for you and i to speak about how to improve you and your company.

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Moving our bodies from point A to point B requires the use of our two legs working together to achieve this simple task. If one or the other of the two legs does not fully support the body, or if one does not make a full and even stride, then the act can be diminished by varying degrees.

The metaphor holds true for your organization and its internal customers as well. Internal customers are those people who make up the other departments that work with you inside your business. For example, accounts-receivable, sales, production, finance and marketing are each other’s customers. For your organization to function smoothly, people among departments must communicate clearly, organize tasks and timelines, and implement or take “action” on these tasks.

The more effective people are at serving each other, the smoother their processes will be, and they will achieve better results (i.e., production, efficiencies, and profits). Likewise, the more efficient a person is with “leg movements,” the better they will be at walking, jogging, and even running. If they take this act seriously and become expert in this area, they may even end up running faster than others, which is, of course the objective in business — outpacing the competition.

Here are suggestions on how to provide stellar internal customer service:

1. Be aware of what you think about yourself and others. Behavior follows thought. Are your thoughts helping you and building you up, or are your thoughts hurting you and making circumstances more difficult? Practice self-respectful thoughts.

2. Communicate clearly and often. Ask for clarification when you are unsure of what is conveyed through verbal and non-verbal means.

3. Talk face-to-face or by phone to others instead of using e-mail. The benefits of this process far outweigh the time saved by using e-mail. Too much e-mail can be a “crutch” and seriously impact the fluidity of a group of people working to achieve common goals.

4. Conduct department-to-department staff meetings so that people can ask each other for information, clarification and process refinement, etc. It’s like “speed dating” for departments. For instance, gather staff from each department and give those people 10-15 minutes to ask people from another department for what they need or could provide to make their processes or organization function more smoothly. In other words, this is what we need from you. What do you need from us to make your jobs easier, more effective and fun?

Prioritize these ideas, assign who will do what by when, and then monitor in thirty days to determine results and make adjustments. In fewer than 60 minutes, the people in both departments will have gathered tons of precise information and a new outlook on their colleagues.

5. Talk about the white elephant in the corner that everyone knows about and talks about in their “cliques” but doesn’t address directly or in formal meetings.

These “TABOO” topics are the “real problems” that keep departments and companies from running faster than they currently do and could if they learned to overcome them.

Everyone knows about these white elephant topics and the professional “manipulators”, so the quicker these topics are brought to the table the quicker the organization can find solutions to them and move forward. I am not saying this process is going to be fun. All I’m saying is that I’ve done this HUNDREDS of times and in every case 99% of the people are much more productive and happier. and as a result, the organization can dump the anchors and start moving swiftly again. (the one percent that aren’t happy are the manipulators that either have to change their game to get along or are forced out).

This part of the process is often very difficult to decide on and implement. But like surgery, everyone is much healthier after the fact and the business and people within it will fly once this ball and chain topic or person isn’t keeping it grounded.

Kelly Graves, CEO
The Corporate Therapist
Email: Kelly@CorporateTherapist.com
Cell: 1.530.321.5309
Toll-Free: 1.800.704.3785
Office: 1.530.321.5309
Internal Business Solutions, Inc.™