Making Strategy Reality - Am I The Best Person To Do This
No one can do everything - not even some of the time. All businesses and organisations depend on mundane jobs to reach their goals, but sometimes these creep into our to do lists resulting in too much management time being spent on non-productive activities. The demands we face at work require constant juggling and it can be easier to slip into spending too much time on low-value activities, particularly if they are 'easy wins' in contrast to addressing strategic priorities, or staff issues, which take us outside our comfort zone.
A business plan or strategy should be central to every business so common sense suggests than the majority of management time should be focused on activities which will deliver the strategy. Unfortunately many businesses and organisations, regardless of their size, fail to reach their full potential because their strategy isn’t the central focus for management. Businesses need to be flexible and dynamic, but flexibility without a plan or strategy is a journey without direction. Flexibility is most powerful when organisations can react quickly to the need to change, their strategy is adapted to reflect these changes and organisation-wide impact of these changes is fully understood.
To make business plans or strategy reality organisations need:
- A clear destination
- A starting point
- Persistence
In a large organisation there are individuals and departments with niche responsibilities whereas in SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) those responsible for defining and leading on the business plans or strategy have many other responsibilities and it’s these that steal their time and if they aren’t careful they find themselves spending more time on these than on delivering their strategy.
The majority of your effective management time should be focused on delivering your plans or strategy. Nothing happens without effective planning and one way to make strategy reality is to translate your plans or strategy into a series of monthly and weekly actions then prioritising these so they get done. Unfortunately in many businesses this just isn’t the case as management get sidelined by what we view to be important and urgent - urgent because someone is shouting. Another reason we fail to prioritise all our strategic actions is because it takes us somewhere many of us don’t like being .... outside of our comfort zone.
In the words of Dr Stephen Covey, the management guru probably best known for his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”
“The key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule ... but to schedule your priorities.” Think about it. Your priority is to deliver your strategy and to make strategy reality the actions that you need to schedule are the strategic actions.
Just because the buck for the strategic responsibilities stops with you it doesn’t mean actioning those priorities is your job. Time - yours and that of your colleagues - is probably your most valuable commodity - alongside your skills, experience and passion. If you spend 80% of your time doing what you are good at - just think what you could achieve. Time well spent is doing the right thing as well as doing things right.
The Benefits
SFM Consulting has found that the most effective way to make plans or strategy reality is not to deliver a day of heavyweight training, after which the client returns to their office with good intentions but a huge workload that prevents them from breaking away from their old habits, but to provide a series of short, manageable sessions followed up by on-going support - what some people call mentoring. Breaking everything down into bite-sized chunks is key and SFM Consulting helps their clients see where their skills and passions lie, how to make best use of them and how to address the things they think they should be doing but struggle with.
SFM Consulting encourages clients to ask themselves “am I the best person to do the job,” that is, are you the only person in the organization with the skills. The ability to do a job quicker than someone else, isn't always a good reason for doing it, particularly if it's taking you away from things that only you have the skills to do.
If you are spending too much management time on non-productive activities or you are guilty of 'it's quicker if I do it myself,' contact SFM Consulting.
