In Chapter 4: Getting Stuff Done (Implementing — from Plans to Achievements) we covered the requirement to communicate your plans to the members of your team who will be implementing them, resulting in successful achievements. Your achievements represent the steps on your journey through business survival to ultimate success and without a more or less continuing series of achievements, your business may well flounder and end up being dragged into the failure abyss. Your business must keep producing what it is that your customers want, at a price that they are willing to pay for it, whatever ‘it’ is!
As we have seen, the ability to communicate effectively is one of the tools that every manager should have in their management toolbox, but for a business owner, this is not a ‘should’, it is a ‘must’. Your plans will have varying levels of complexity and detail and you’ve got to be able to determine which parts are the most appropriate to communicate to whom and how that is best accomplished. As far as you are concerned, the successful communication of your plan to your team is one of your personal achievements.
Effective communication is at the heart of an effective business
The important thing to remember is that when you are communicating, the more important the message, the more effort you put into it. This should be a statement of the obvious, but in the cut—and—thrust of the working day it is all too easy to forget. You then end up selecting expediency over efficiency and start barking orders at people. Be aware of this possibility and do your best to avoid it. If you are looking for quick updates on progress or communicating simple messages, then don’t hold a company—wide meeting. Conversely, complex ideas are more likely to require meetings to transmit as they will allow the recipients to question you and you to confirm that they really do understand what you mean.
If you are to achieve anything within your business, then you need resources. There are a few different categories of resources and you need to keep your eye on all of them or, better still, delegate some of the responsibility for such to members of your team (see section 7.2, above). Your resources include your buildings, your equipment, your supplies, and so on, but the most important resource at your disposal is your people; the individuals who actually do the work, the people who actually implement your plans.
Okay, like interlocking cogs in a machine, saying that one is more important than another is a bit daft given that the machine will cease to function with any one of those cogs missing, but without your people, there’s not a lot in your business that’ll function on its own. Your buildings will just be empty spaces unless there are people in them working. Your equipment will stand idle with no one working it. Your supplies will gather dust and decay if nothing is done with them. Your telephone won’t be answered and your customer’s orders will go unfulfilled. You get the idea.
However, in the same way that throwing a load of paint at a canvass will not a masterpiece make (usually!), throwing a load of people into your business will not ensure that your business survives. Your people keep your promises to your customers, so what you need are people who have been trained to an objective level of competence to do the jobs for which you recruited them. Now, be careful here and make sure that you focus on the competence rather than the training part of that sentence. A group of people can all go through the same training, but they won’t all be equally competent when they’ve finished.
A conductor without an orchestra is just someone, standing alone, waving their arms around. Having good people around you, a team of competent and motivated individuals, will not only make your business more likely to survive its early years, it’ll make your life (and getting to sleep at night) considerably easier. Lying awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling, is not a good way to face the following working day. It makes it more likely that you’ll steer your business into the failure abyss by accident because you are too tired to make informed decisions correctly. How much more relaxed would you be if you knew that your best manager was on the case and running their part of your business well? Mantra: employ competent, motivated and effective people. That way, many of your potential problems will never arise.
Starting a business that survives its early years long enough to become successful is hard, but it’s a lot easier if you surround yourself with a team that can help. You do not have to do everything yourself, indeed, you shouldn’t, which is why you need competent people around you. One of the skills you must develop if you do not already possess it, is the ability to delegate. Yes, we all know that as a business owner, you see yourself as Atlas with the weight of the world on your shoulders, but everyone else sees you as a control freak who can’t delegate!
Learn to hand over the responsibility and authority for various parts of your business to those people within your team that you trust. If you don’t trust them, then get them trained so that they are competent enough to be trusted. If that doesn’t work, then recruit other people. It really is that important. If you use poor quality ingredients when baking a cake, then you’ll be winning no culinary prizes. Your resources are the ingredients in your business ‘cake’ and your people the most important of these. The better the quality of those ‘ingredients’ the greater your chance of survival and success.
Please don’t forget that responsibility and authority go together; embed this principle in your business. If you delegate responsibility without the associated authority, then you will be creating lame ducks within your business. As your business grows, your senior managers will behave in the same way to the people they manage as you do to them and your entire business will be full of people whose job it is to make sure things run smoothly, but who don’t have the authority necessary to guarantee that. In effect, they will be managing with their hands tied behind their backs. When things go wrong, and they will, you’ll find everyone standing around pointing at one another as they ‘blamestorm’ their way from one failure to the next. Do you think that such a set of behaviours will increase of decrease your business’s chances of survival?
Implementing your plan to produce achievements is what your business must do if customers are to be satisfied and if your business is to survive. However, all ‘achievements’ are not of equal value and the thinking that you must do to produce your plans includes determination of targets. Hitting your targets will give you and your team confidence that you are doing things right, providing that you have put the necessary thinking into your targets. One way to increase the probability of survival is to make your targets SMART.
TINA uses the SMART acronym to stand for Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic and Time—bound. Now, every target doesn’t have to have all the SMART components, but the more important the target, the more SMART it should be. As with resources, you can argue a reasonable case for each component of SMART being the most important one, but if you are going to survive, then you could do worse that focus upon ‘Agreed’. Why? Well, if you accept that the most important resource in your business is your people, then the most important component of a target must be their agreement to hit it! If your people don’t agree, then you will be reduced to ‘command and control’ as a method of management rather than ‘communicate and control’, and you might as well then just spend your time barking orders.
Just do it
In summary, TINA’s Implementing sector prompts you to you communicate the appropriate parts of your plans to those people in your team that can best implement them. The people best able to implement are those who are demonstrably competent, motivated and in possession of delegated responsibilities and authorities required to fulfil their roles. Appropriate parts of your plans must have associated targets, which should be SMART to give you the best chance of success, but at the very least must be agreed. In this way, you’ll have greater confidence that you will be effecting a continuing series of achievements that will keep your business away from the failure abyss.