3 P's to help when business is moving too slow
Business moving too slow?
Check the 3 P’s
How does your business stack up?
Purpose
No I don’t mean that in the fluffy, esoteric and hard to grasp kid of way. I mean purpose as in utility. What is this company for? What am I the employee for?
If each individual in the company cannot articulate what the company is for and what meaningful work they do to support that purpose they will lack focus and direction.
Without purpose we cannot prioritise which they mean everything is important (or nothing) and when everything is important we so busy work. ie emails, interruptions and meetings, meetings, meetings.
Protection
You have clarity of purpose, you have prioritised, what is the most energising thing you could experience now?
Progress. So what prevents progress? Other people. Changes in strategy, emails, interruptions, meeting invites all killing momentum.
The leaders job is to create systems and practises that protection each individuals time and momentum so that they can experience progress and fulfilment which result in constant improvements in performance.
Just think about it. You’re racing along in a flow state then suddenly you’re interrupted. It takes 15-30 minutes to get back into flow, then you’re interrupted again. Pretty soon you give up and just plod along feeling like it’s pointless trying to get much done to protect yourself from constant frustration.
Another thing to protect your people from is the toxic behaviour whether that’s customers or colleagues these are two of the most energy draining so soul destroying things someone can experience. Failure to protect employees from this is to put your people last.
Product
Everyone in the team should LOVE the product for what it does. They should understand it, they should rave about it. They should be able interpret and use it and know where it is going.
That doesn’t mean it should be perfect and bug free but too often employees aren’t clear on what their product is, how it works, what problem it solves or they are asked to claim it can do things it can’t, or that’s it’s perfect. This does far more harm than many leaders realise. It asks people, sales people in particular to lie to someone they are trying to build a long term and fruitful relationship with but it also creates conflict and confusion internally. Lack of transparency around product is a big cause of employee frustration, procrastination, overwhelm and ultimately, turn over.
So that’s the three P’s of performance how dialled in are yours?