In our last post, we covered the first action market leaders from our research took to make a performance improvement - tough decisions to get the right team in place. In this post, we cover the second activity required to make a breakthrough: creation of breathing space.
Every company that made a breakthrough found a way to create breathing space so that management could get away from piles of day-to-day matters and take time to reflect properly on the business. The leaders emphasised how criticalit was for their senior people to be able to spend time thinking about important, but non-urgent issues without distractions and the need to engage in permanent fire-fighting.
Dominant external factors that stole managers’ attention and intruded upon proper breathing space were cash flow pressures and customer servicing demands.
Deliberate and successful means of dealing with the distraction of cash flow issues were varied. The two most prevalent that didn’t rely on rich parents were, firstly, tough internal decisions to take the costs of the business below ongoing revenues; and secondly focusing deliberately on generating continual rather than one-off revenue streams, which could mean taking a lower margin to buy revenue continuity.
Customer servicing demands were also an unhealthily large day-to-day management distraction for companies struggling to break through. When entering into relationships with clients, leaders consciously took care not to overstretch themselves. For example one leader limited the number of new clients it engaged with every year because the additional servicing needs of new clients could affect performance with existing clients. Another leader used a series of financial and non-financial pre-contract tests upon which it needed to be satisfied before accepting new business.
Though finance and customer service were the biggest external assailants of breathing space, most problems were essentially self-inflicted. As one MD said: "we were the arsonists as well as the firefighters".
MDs of successful companies talked of ways of achieving breathing space that were simply means of ring-fencing time for managers to take their attention beyond the day-to-day. These included simplifying management structures so that responsibilities were clear; giving managers enough time and ownership to work out how to achieve their objectives before interfering; hiring personal assistants; and taking regular team away days. It was always simple stuff that gave managers room and a separate time to work on the important as opposed to the urgent.
Creation of breathing space was the second critical step that our breakthrough performers took. After breakthrough to leadership positions, our market leaders faced some new challenges that required new disciplines to address them. We'll cover these two disciplines in our next two posts.
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For the full text of this series email steve@latitude.co.uk
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