Getting the Right Things Done Right
I was in Phoenix last week at the Summer Conference for TTI Performance Systems. Always in pursuit of how we can help our clients manage their businesses and their talent better, a select group of 50 of us put our head down and went to work: branstorming, collaborating, sharing knowledge, and listening to experts in our various disciplines. As I was looking at my own consulting and coaching practice, I was thinking that some of these reminders would be helpful to you, as you lead your teams and companies to improve performance. Here were a few of my “takeaways”:
1. Addressing the right challenges by monetizing them. We are often very good at identifying a problem, and then throwing a solution at it, without calculating the cost of the problem and doing our research to figure out how we can dollarize the solution. Sometimes a bit hard to do on “softer” issues, we can still establish some metrics, which helps us prioritize what project to take on next. Often we are surprised at the cost of an issue and realize it needs to be addressed sooner than something we had on the front burner. For example, reducing the number of candidates you have to interview from 10 to 3 to make a good hire, reducing the hours per day your employees are wasting from 3 to 2….these seemingly small tweaks can add millions to your bottom line, depending on the size of your company.
2. Doing the right things right. Over the years, many of us have become very good at what we do. But it begs the question “Is what we do well what sells?” How many of our markets will be obsolete in a short time? We must not only do things right, as we are used to, but we must do the right things right in order to insure the survival of our business.Just the other day I received a social media message from a friend of mine, who said ” I will no longer be using email. I will communitcate with you all through social media sites. I thought to myself “I know that home telephones are almost obsolete, but is e-mail going to be obsolete, too?” I remember when travel agents became obsolete…..what’s next?
3. Reading the right books. The late Charlie “Tremendous” Jones used to say that 5 years from today you’ll be the same person you are today except for two things: the books you read and the people you hang around. Author Krissi Barr, delivered our opening keynote address. I highly recommend her new book “Plugged”. If you are a leader in your organization, I suggest getting it for each of your team members and having them read it. www.PluggedTheBook.com Just to prove she preaches what she practices, I have to tell you this. She left the conference 1/2 day early. By that evening I had already received a personal e-mail from her and I know she wasn’t home yet, since it was only a few hours later and she lives in Cincinnati. I don’t even know that her plane would have been off the ground yet.
4. Collaborating with the right people. This seemed to be the recurring theme of the week. We at TTI are a group of 7,000 consultants, coaches, and business experts in 70 countries, speaking 26 languages. We have an amazing array of talent and incredible depth of knowledge. Some of us discovered we could “outsource” more to eachother, delivering a higher-grade service to you, our clients. Here’s a question for you: Where in your organization are you re-inventing the wheel? The concept of highest and best use is not just a real estate concept; it is true with talent management as well.
There are many other things I took away from our conference, including many new resources in the psychometric assessments you already know and love. www.ttiassessments.com Lots of new research and many new offerings you will be seeing in the coming weeks and months…….but I’m not letting the cat out of the bag just yet. You’ll have to contact me for the goodies! julia@mentaliron.com
Tags: 360 Surveys, Behavioral assessments, Best Practices, Collaboration, Customer Satisfaction, Executive Coach, improve performance, Increase Engagement, Julia Marrocco, Krissi Barr, management consultant, monetizing problems, Performance Metrics, PluggedTheBook, Talent Management, TTI
