Musings at Altitude

It’s been an interesting business year for me (a gross understatement), and I wanted to quickly share some business tips that come from this year of learning:

(1) when you ask for things from your business units that require significant work, make sure you acknowledge receipt, show appreciation for the work, and then use what you ask for in some meaningful way; it’s amazing to me (but it really shouldn’t be) how managers (at levels all the way up an organization) collect significant data or detailed plans and then that data and those plans end up being collected into books and put on the shelf for long periods of time and then many times not used at all; everything levied down in an organization requires resources to respond to and thus cost to the business units; everyone should respect the costs and the distractions that needless requests cause

(2) governance (or an authority matrix) may be the most critical issue for establishing trust and creating an efficient operating environment; and yet most of the time, governance is ambiguous at best or irrational at worst, thus creating chaos and confusion and halting most business momentum before it can be established; trust and empowerment are so hard to achieve and allow in a business when they shouldn’t be; wouldn’t it be cool if we started with trust and then tightened up on governance based on the lessons we learn during our trusting process

(3) speaking of trust, it always amazes me how understanding team members usually are to needed change (reactive or proactive) if they believe that their leaders can be trusted and have the team’s best interests at heart; in any change process, some of your best folks will feel impacted (even if not)and those impacts can be quickly addressed, minimized, mitigated or completely absolved if trust has been established and dialogue can occur

(4) “practice what you preach” applies not only in lives but in business as well; if you want your team members to be conscious of costs and optimizing efficiences, then practice what you preach; if you want your team to focus on the bottom line, then practice what you preach; if you want your teams to aggressively grow (at levels above competitive norms), then resource them properly and remove barriers to success so that they can achieve above norms; if you want your team embrace your values, then live your values

(5) when you have “an elephant in the room” (an issue of any type or any magnitude that could bring all momentum to a screeching halt) then hunt down the elephant and kill it; very little creates more chaos and uncertainty in an organization than the elephant that everyone is watching or ignoring and no one is addressing

Hope you had a great week!