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OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY
We have recently received a call from a prospective client who told us:
“I HAVE AN UNDERPERFORMING INDIVIDUAL AND HAVE SPENT A GREAT DEAL OF MONEY OVER THE PAST YEAR BY SENDING THEM ON TRAINING COURSES, BUT IT HASN’T MADE ANY DIFFERENCE AT ALL. ALL OF THE TRAINING MUST HAVE BEEN RUBBISH. BEFORE I START DISCIPLINARY PROCEEDINGS, I HAVE TO GIVE THEM ONE FINAL CHANCE. WHAT CAN YOU OFFER?”
The core problem is often very simple to find, but is frequently overlooked. Perhaps the skills and abilities of your people are already very good and they don’t need improving. Consequently, money spent on training courses may, indeed, be wasted. There must be other reasons why the individual, or a team, is not delivering their expected levels of performance.
We often encounter highly skilled teams of professionals who are still not achieving their targets. How can this be? Perhaps they are not doing the ‘right things’?
Our approach at The Richard Denny Group is, from the outset, to work with the individual’s Line Manager to diagnose what the problem is. It’s often simply about better planning and organisation. We help the Manager to identify activities which are most likely to deliver their team’s performance goals and to prioritise them in a logical and practical way.
Because we are human beings, we carry a ‘curse’ of enjoying some tasks more than others. We enjoy meeting some people more than others. It is not unusual, in business, to enjoy being with a quarter of your clients, dread being with a quarter of them and feel ambivalent about the remaining fifty percent! So where do we spend our time? With our ‘favourites’? How does that deliver our results?
We have seen examples of business people delaying or cancelling meetings because they believe that certain clients will give them a ‘hard time’. They don’t want to voluntarily put themselves into that position
EVEN IF THE CLIENT HAS A LOT OF MONEY TO SPEND!
Our emotions can lead us to unintentionally spend the ‘wrong’ amount of time with the ‘wrong’ people for the ‘wrong’ reasons. And that’s a recipe for underperformance. We need, somehow, to suspend our emotions when we decide who we wish to meet with and when we undertake our business tasks.
We need a more dispassionate and focussed approach to deciding what we do - a logical approach to planning our activities. If we spend the ‘right’ time with the ‘right’ people and we have the ‘right’ abilities to turn those planned meetings into business, then we will deliver the ‘right’ results.
