Observing others, teams, organizations, companies not moving (forward), making any progress it seems like some things have not been clarIfied how to…

If you, your team, your organization or your company want to make significant progress some important topics need to be defined and adressed precisley, sometimes regularly repeated, such as

– what is the objective, the result, the progress you are expecting
– who is responsible, doing what and until when
– Being agile: Requesting progress regularly
– Defining and having and overview about agreed frameworks: regularly interferring if actions, ways, decisions, results, budget and date excedences occur away from your agreed framework and adjust

Therefore leadership has to have a clear edge, being precise in its request, in its definition for an objective, where to move to, what things need to be undertaken and what things should be prevented. Vague directives will not help.

For effective lessons learned and continuous improvement we need to move towards a failure culture.

The major challenge to overcome is to talk about mistakes, failures, scrap rate and rework without finger pointing.
Without open communication and common understanding what went wrong, failures will be repeated.

Fingerpointing – making people responsible for reasons, not taking responsibility for your own mistakes will not support establishing a failure culture. Naming persons, departments, functions, responsibilities need to be excluded talking about failures, or root cause analysis and improvement will fail.

To talk about issues, conflicts, failures, mistakes is the initial step to improve.

The more successful you or your company has been in the past the more difficult it is to recognize significant changes of your environment, the markets or customer behaviour and that this requires an adaption of you or your company towards new situations, in other words towards signficant change.

Whenever discussing necessary changes to be prepared for the future with my clients or colleagues in various industries I oftentimes hear
– ”the change will not work with us”
– “it has always been like that”
– “the change is not necessary, why should we”
– “to expensive, no market, no customer demand, no return”
– ”we already thought about this but it doesn`t make sense for us”
– “we have been successul without change”
– “we are still and will be very successful without change”
– ”no need for change, we are the best in what we do anyhow” and
– “we will exist with what we already did the last decades sucessfully”.
In total all the same: we don`t want to change, we want to stay in our safe harbour.

The success of the past is reflecting the intensity of your todays comfortzone. If we stay within we end up like not producing digital cameras (AGFA, KODAK), loosing (significant) market share to smart phone producers (NOKIA) and still catching up to TESLA producing electrified cars (complete german automotive industry)…
Always be aware that your success of the past is not a guarantuee for your success of the future. Adapation, adjustment and change is part of the daily business – It is the most agile who will survive, not the strongest.

Happy to read your thoughts on this…

We are lacking on qualified employees, there is many unutilized jobs out there, we do not have enough experts.

THIS IS THE CURRENT STATE OF THE JOB MARKET.

The natural fluctuation of our senior colleagues cannot be compensated by the same numbers of new hires and trainees.

This fact is well known since more than 30 years! How do you deal with the loss of experience and expertise capacity in your organization, team, company?

Unfortunately there are no short-term measures. You need to untertake some permanent acitvities that should be on your regular agenda, such as…

The ‘war of talents’ will not end in the next years. Efforts and costs for hiring, integrating and ramping up new colleagues are always more expensive than intensifying the identification and the connection of your colleagues and your company.

Happy to read your thoughts on this…

Trust in your team and trust in the task-management of your employees rather than micromanage. Micromanagement is counterproductive.

Managing the tasks of every employee on detail and controlling any step of employees robs valuable time that could be invested in actual management-relevant tasks.

Micromanagement leads to a corporate culture, where employees reflect the loss of trust within the team, where employees loose their intrinsic motivation & where leaders overwork – loosing the capacity for management priorities.

Valuable results follow from trust!

Trust in your team, expand and grow with your team!

Probably the biggest challenge of an entrepreneurials life is to hand over your business to a successor.

After serial discussions with entrepreneurs with no successor in place my top three points to solve this challenge:

(1) Define your activities and competencies that need to be handed over – what does it take to fit in your shoes?

(2) Search for the person (s) with the necessary (basic) skills to take over your activities, maybe not from one day to another but within a reasonable timeframe – and with your support.

(3) What`s your price for your lifetime work? Evaluate your business and verify with market prices, compare with peers and consider what price might be possible to be financed by a successor. Your purchase price need to be re-financed by the new owner within a reasonable timeframe, 5-7 years.

Promoting home office and mobile working – however, not every job is adequate for remote working nor is it for every type of person.

Some jobs cannot be transferred outside of the company, some environments might not be suitable for work.

Beside that – for some colleagues an office environment might be mandatory to be more efficient than in their private environment.

Based on my experience before and since #CORONA, I came to my own conclusion: In the end it is a matter of (self-) management and the way of leadership to decide on remote working and how to organize it the best way.

What do you think? Happy to read about your experience…

Companies still discuss the effectiveness and efficiency of home office or any kind of remote and mobile working.

I do really wonder why? It is a proven concept!

There are only three major prerequistes that need to be fulfilled:

(1) Deliver your dedicated tasks in quality and in time,
(2) therefor, delegate the tasks as precise as necessary with a due date,
(3) and be availabe for any kind of calls and (digital meetings)!

The base of it is built in mutual trust & the organization of some frame requirements.

If there is a possibility, meet in person (from time to time) to maintain the social relationship!

Read that in my next blog about the ‘wherever office’

Processing research and recruiting and helding hundreds of interviews hiring new employees, there are only very few major factors why you should engage an applicant.

The CV might be the entry ticket reflecting the minimum basic skills for an invitation, but the interview is much more important to learn more about the potentiial new colleague. There is only one criteria left that shows me if it makes sense to hire the candidate…

Is this person really burning for this job, he/ she is applying for and how does he show you, to believe this?

Most probably impression might come through during the interview in the first few minutes…

Every process has its lead time. The time you spend with activities getting things done is very little compared to its overall lead time until you have the result. There are phases within the process you are loosing time.

Identify where and how much time you spend in between the initial idea until you get the result of a process, reasons for loss of lead time are
…overthinking
…waiting for a/ your decision
…waiting for/ your response