Archive for the ‘Leadership’ tag
Can Benchmarking Help My Business?
Everyone is always trying to keep score. In business we generally use sales and profits as the most basic indicator of how a business is doing. If these indicators are up, we are happy, negative the opposite. But how do we get even better if we are up or how do we attack the problem if the company is down? Benchmarking is a good answer. You can benchmark your business internally, versus other businesses in your industry as well as versus other business outside your industry. The benchmark information will give you the clues you need.
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Management By Wandering Around (MBWA)
Is the idea of management by wandering around (MBWA), first presented in 1982 by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman in their book, In Search of Excellence, still a valid concept? Today we have so much more data and information at our fingertips through internal and external sources. Can we find everything we need right at our desks? Yes, you can find the baseline information. But no, you cannot make the best decisions for the organization. Without real world experiential data you lack the information necessary to get the real texture of what is going on in the business.
Without texture or context you have only half the answer. It is like trying to make a decision on buying a car without seeing it. You know it will take you down the highway, but will you be comfortable with the trip.
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Working With Inexperienced Employees
Everyone hires what they believe to be qualified employees. We spend hours creating elaborate job descriptions, listing all the qualifications needed to get the job done. We spend hours crafting the best interview questions for the interview process. Then we advertise for candidates from the best apprentice programs, technical schools, junior colleges, colleges, universities, and competitors. We may even pay to have each potential employee tested, so we know as much as we can about the individual, to make the best hiring decision possible.
The organization make a hire. But then what? We may have a new employee orientation program to get them up to speed about the organization. Orientation programs can only go so far. We then put the new person on the job and promptly ignore them and wonder why the person isn’t working out as we hoped.
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Leadership?
What is leadership? If you go to Dictionary.com and look at the definition of leadership you recognize very quickly that to understand what leadership is you must understand what it means to lead. Dictionary.com takes a combined fifty stabs at defining lead as a verb and noun. To list a few as a verb it defines lead as to go before or with to show the way; to conduct by holding and guiding; to influence or induce; to guide in direction, course, action, opinion, etc.; to command or direct. As a noun lead means the first or foremost place; position in advance of others; a person or thing that leads.
What does it mean to be a leader?
In simple terms, to define what it means to lead, we could use the old Calvin Coolidge adage, “The buck stops here.” The key is not just understanding what it takes to lead, but how it is accomplished. It means sometimes leaders are going to make decisions that are not popular. For example, today, if we look into politics, leadership is starting to mean do what the latest poles show us. Maybe in a political sense this is okay because politicians are supposed to be representing the people. However, this assumes that a pole will show what is better for the greater good rather than the poled population.