August 20, 2015- ISSN# 1545-2646
Dot to dot for Employees
When building a business the quality of your overall performance is critical to your long term success. This includes the commitment to your vision, mission, business goals, sales, expense management and the development of your staff.
Each year lots of dollars are invested in staff training and development. This comes in the form of formal training, on the job experience and training which happens by participating in the companies objectives.
Too often I witness organizations doing training but they neglect to actually help the staff connect the dots of why and how all the various items tie together.
As leaders we can not assume that your team members actually have the business acumen to figure out why, how and when things are done for specific reasons.
Newer hires are totally focused on just understanding their specific tasks. They really don’t see how they fit in to the bigger picture. Longer term staff are in a routine mode of executing their work activities and focusing solely on getting them done. More veteran staff, although maybe have a broader view of the business, are not always concerned about how they fit into the full picture. They are pin point focused on just their work area and not how it ties in to the hand off down stream.
It is as simple as an expense report which your new employee completes by filling in fields on a form. Their focus is on selecting the right value as explained in the notes on how to fill in the sheet. They don’t understand that an error on this basic level causes multiple extra touches downstream if their attention to detail and proper selection is not executed correctly. They don’t understand the ramification of not connecting the dots in the business to the impact it has on company performance.
Some just blow it off as someone else’s job and if they miss it someone else will catch it and correct it. They feel that is why some of those other roles in the company exist is to catch their mistakes and correct them – WRONG!
This week it is time to start to plan on connecting the dots in your business. As children we learned numbers and letters by working the connect the dots puzzles. When we did not follow the proper order of connecting the dots, the resulting picture was abnormal. This is absolutely true about your business. When the chain of events to run an effective business are not followed then the resulting performance is jumbled up resulting in lower performance. Take some time this week and ask a few employees about some aspect of your business and why and how the company is able to perform those actions. Don’t be surprised if you get the deer in the headlights look.
Wondering if you need to help your people connect the dots? Give us a call (313) 527-7945.
Questions or comments – email us at partners@jklassociates.com or call our Office at (313) 527-7945
Copyright – JKL Associates 2015
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