Are You Frustrated by a Lack of Clarity and Focus?

Do you have a clear picture of where you want to take your business but it’s ‘inside your head’? A common desire for all business owners is clarity and focus in planning whether starting from scratch or dusting off an existing plan.  

Some questions you can ask yourself to gain clarity include:  

• Why does this business exist?

• How do we behave (core values)?

• How do I define success?

• What’s most important right now?

Write down the answers to these questions and revisit them over the period of a few days.  Then share and discuss the document with your leadership team.  Ask them if your description matches your actions and if their perception of what you’re building is different.

Creating clarity means that you know where you’re headed and not being taken to some accidental place like a leaf carried by water in a stream.  There’s a great quote by Lily Tomlin where she said:  “I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.”  Every day we’re creating something, either by accident or on purpose.  Having clarity about what you’re creating will guide your decisions and help you prioritize your next steps.

This post is #2 in a series of 4 specific to the GG one process. View the full series: 

• Three Simple Steps to One Workable Plan

• Focusing Behaviors Is All About Decision Making

• Results Worth Measuring

Three Simple Steps to One Workable Plan

What’s the magic in one?  One company, moving in one direction, with one vision, working from one overall guiding plan.  Sound simple?  It’s simple but it’s not easy.   Ask any business owner what frustrates them about the planning process and their primary complaints are that it becomes too complicated, too cumbersome and too hard to manage.  The key is to take the complex and figure out how to communicate it in a simple way.  The three steps I use in my CG one process are 1) Create Clarity 2) Focus Behaviors and 3) Measure Results.    

• Step 1: Create Clarity. Start by getting really clear about what you’re building. Can you describe it on one page? Is it clear enough that you can share it with anyone in your company and they would understand where you’re leading the company?

• Step 2: Focus Behaviors. You need to determine what behaviors will get you to the vision you have. If you want different results, you’ll need different behaviors. What are those behaviors or activities that need to happen consistently in order to produce the results you’re looking for? What kind of training and development might be needed?

• Step 3: Measure Results. What are the key metrics you need to meet and how will you evaluate your progress on a regular basis? Be sure to look at both leading and lagging indicators so you’re looking both forward and backward. Then bring visibility to those metrics—the leadership team needs to be evaluating results on a regular basis and asking, “What’s working, what’s not working, and what needs to change?”

This post is #1 in a series of 4 specific to the GG one process. View the full series: 

• Are You Frustrated by a Lack of Clarity and Focus?

• Focusing Behaviors Is All About Decision Making

• Results Worth Measuring

Staying Focused on What’s Important

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So you’ve figured out the three most important areas to your business this year, but now how do you stay focused on them? Ideally those themes are incorporated in your business planning for the year, but if you don’t have a written business plan, there are some simple ways you can keep these concepts front and center.

First, you can incorporate them into your regular, on-going communication with your team. As an example, your weekly or monthly ‘state of the company’ can include an update on progress made relative to the top three priorities.

Second, your management team meetings can include time for a monthly ‘gut check’ where the group challenges your commitment to those areas. As an example, if you’ve stated that improving employee morale is a priority, but you’re not allocating additional resources in this area, how is that going to happen?

And third, you can use those top three priorities to guide individual performance management plans. If the areas of focus are important to the company, everyone should be focused on them and looking at what role they can play in advancing them.

Figuring Out What’s Important

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If someone asked you what the three most important things are you need to be focused on this year, would you know? What do you think your managers would say if you asked them the same question?

Most people can identify what is important generally in their business; profitability, customer service, employee morale, etc. But to really make big strides in our businesses, we need to be clear on which areas for change will provide greater leverage--will yield bigger results. Unfortunately the sheer volume of work that most people manage on a day to day basis can make it a struggle to identify those big picture initiatives.

To gain clarity on what’s most important to your business right now; your two biggest sources of information are your customers and your employees. If you don’t have clarity on your three most important areas or initiatives, consider a 30-day plan of reaching out to both employees and customers to solicit their input on how they think you’re doing as an organization, and where they see potential for improvement. Figuring out what’s most important is the first step in directing resources in your organization to where they will produce the biggest results.

Implementing Your Game Changers

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So you’ve figured out your ‘game-changers’ for the year, but have you created your implementation plan? Most people can readily tell you what big capacity building projects are important to take their business to the next level, but the harder part of course, is getting them implemented!

Part of the reason ‘game-changers’ can be hard to implement, is because they are usually not something that is standing in the way of the day-to-day business getting done. Game-changers by definition are a project that usually spans several months and has several steps or sub-projects that must be completed.

The key to getting game-changers implemented is to create a timeline that breaks apart the larger initiative into smaller, incremental deadlines. Once that timeline is created, the key is to maintain a tracking system for monitoring the timeline. The goal is to keep it front and center so you’re reminded on a regular basis of what & when you committed to doing each step of the way. A good practice is to revisit your timeline either weekly or monthly depending on the length of the overall project. Ideally this practice is part of your organization’s monthly management meeting so everyone on the team is helping each other create focus and move their game-changers to completion.