Maximizing the Human Potential

Leadership and Engagement and the Bottom Line

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andrew shaffer consulting leadership and engagement

When I talk about employee engagement or leadership, people tend to think it is a soft skill. Engagement isn’t something tangible, or that shows up as a line item on the P&L statement. I must admit; I had the same thoughts. In fact, when I started by consulting business, I tried to avoid the words leadership and engagement. Yes, I tried to avoid the words that describe what I do, precisely because they sound like soft skills.  As you can imagine, that made things a bit of a challenge when explaining what I do, and probably wasn’t good business practice.  This week, I want to get into some of the hard results I experienced when focusing on leadership and engagement, that made it important enough for me to focus a business around it.

Leadership and Engagement and the Bottom Line

In EVERY business I’ve worked in or with, there were always inefficiencies that impacted the bottom line. Whether it be people that weren’t properly trained in their jobs and inefficient, or unnecessary bureaucracy, or frequent re-work because of errors and lack of communication.  These things add to labor costs, and most of the time are the cost of doing business. What would happen if they weren’t part of the cost of doing business? What if you had trained and efficient employees or if decisions weren’t bogged down by bureaucracy? Could you minimize mistakes and do it right the first time? Those are the opportunity cost associated with leadership and engagement.

Today I am going to share a few examples of hidden profit killers that I have seen throughout my working life.

Process Inefficiencies

At one point in a previous career, I was responsible for the testing of some complex engineering systems. We were the final test before the units were shipped to our customer. Because we were almost the last step in the process, there was rarely any slack in our schedule. By the time the systems showed up, we had to turn them around quickly to meet customer need dates. From set up to tear down, the whole process should have taken 3 hours.  Meaning we could easily test two systems in a typical 8-hour shift.  When I started this almost NEVER happened. Rarely could we get through a test in 3 hours.  Typically, it took almost an 8-hour shift to complete a test. Why? There were terrible inefficiencies inherent in our process.

Showing Leadership

How does this situation apply to leadership and engagement? Last week, I talked about complacency, and this is the way it is. And before I took over, that is the way it was. The difference was that someone on my staff approached me and said this was terribly inefficient, and he wanted to do something about it. He saw a problem and had a vision of a better future.  He knew there was a better way.  So, he shared that vision with me and the other members of my team, and elicited help. This is leadership.

Creating Engagement

At this point, creating engagement was easy. A better future was laid out to the team, and people wanted to be part of this process. So, I assigned a team to review our testing processes and inefficiencies to create a more robust testing condition.  I have to say the level of participation was astounding. There were second shift people coming in early, first shift people staying late. We had junior personnel and senior personnel and everywhere in between looking to create a better test environment.  The goal was to reduce testing by 50%, or from 8 hours down to 4 hours.

Results

What was the result?  Well, when I moved on, we didn’t quite get the testing down to a consistent 4 hours. On average, we got the test time down to about 5 hours. So, with two people running the test, we freed up about six man hours each night (30 hours each week) to accomplish other tasks. With the same amount of staff, we reduced testing costs, and increased productivity. Both of those were metrics any manager will be happy to see.

I could share a story where there was a recurring problem where there was a lack of leadership and engagement. But that would be boring, because they are probably still having the same problem!

This Week’s Challenge

Are you curious if there are hidden operational costs in your business?  Give us a call for an assessment and consultation and see how you can start improving your bottom line.

As a loyal reader I am offering a 25% discount on our motivational assessments. Do you want to know what motivates your employees? Contact us now and let’s have a conversation.

If you would like to discuss more ways to help your business grow or if you feel you have a specific problem that needs to be addressed, please reach out to me.

 

Setting a Priority

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andrew shaffer consulting setting a priority for your businessI have a client that is hell bent on building a successful business. She is a relatively new business owner and is learning as much as she can to be successful. I have to admire her enthusiasm. But there is ONE problem. Actually, the problem is actually a lack of ONE problem. Because she is learning so much, she is trying to find ways to implement everything all at ONCE and ends up being overwhelmed. This situation can occur with large companies too, and if there are several layers of management, it can be worse. This week I am going to talk about the importance of setting a priority for your business and focusing on it until completion.

Setting a Priority

You are a great leader. You’re ambitious and pride yourself on getting things done. I mean that is how you’ve been successful throughout your career. Besides, you can do anything if you make it your #1 priority, right? The truth is how many #1 priorities can you have? Answer: 1.

I’ve fallen into this trap before. I’ve sat in staff meetings, telling my team that solving this problem has to be our #1 priority. Then, I am reminded that last week we had a different #1 priority. It wasn’t that my team didn’t want to work both, or both problems weren’t important. My team knew that they only had so much energy and wanted to get the most productivity out of their time.

Proactive leadership is about looking to the future and creating a responsive vs reactive culture. Here are some common barriers to proactive leadership.

Symptoms

When working with large companies, I have noticed that every time there was a change in leadership a new initiative was introduced. This makes sense, the new executive wants to solve a problem and have an impact. So, the logical thing to do is to create a new initiative for improvement. But, what happens when two or three new initiatives are introduced by different executives? Or even worse, what happens when an aspiring manager is positioning themselves for an executive leadership. It can be overwhelming the number of new initiatives or priorities that can come down in a large organization.

Too many initiatives, or priorities will turn proactive leadership into reactive leadership. Your employees are busy enough with their “day jobs” and now they have to focus on half dozen new ideas? I have been in a meeting where my boss actually said, “Let’s wait and see if this sticks before taking action.” My boss decided to be reactive. He decided to wait until his lack of effort caused a problem, then he’d react to it at that point. Not only did it kill this initiative, but it killed every initiative that came afterword.

Solution

The solution is simple: Don’t overload your employees. There will always be another great idea, another market to capture, service to provide, or way to be successful. But what will kill any initiative is a start and stop momentum. When people are asked to focus on too many things, they don’t do any of them well. Choose one initiative or priority and focus until it is complete. I mean your people have enough to work on just doing their jobs. How much more can they handle?

Benefit

So, the benefit of setting a priority and completing it is that you get things accomplished. You create a culture of success. Your employees know what is important today will still be important tomorrow. They, and you, will develop a habit of completing projects. There is nothing more frustrating than focusing on a project and not seeing it through to completion. Or even worse, by the time you finish something it is obsolete because it took too long because of your other priorities.

Managers and leaders in your organization can be proactive when focusing on fewer things. They know what is important and they can concentrate on completion.

This Week’s Challenge

Limit your initiatives and priorities to one or two at the most, and clearly understand which is number one and number two. Make them your focus for your weekly meetings. Avoid the temptation of chasing the next good idea. I promise when you’re done with this idea another will be waiting for you to execute.

If you would like to discuss more ways to help your business grow or if you feel you have a specific problem that needs to be addressed, please reach out to me.