Working on the Right Things

I wrote an article recently entitled ‘Is Investing in Your Business Discretionary’. The article focussed on where business owners will invest their money to improve the performance of their business. The article questions our discretion in where we place our investment.

It goes hand in hand with what we, as individuals, believe needs to be worked on first.

I have been asked in the past, when presenting recommendations and timeframes to implement recommendations, why they (the business owner), can’t decide what to do when. It’s a pretty simple answer really.

We will naturally do what we believe is important. What may be deemed as important may be very different from one person to the next within your business. We will also tend to do those tasks which we like, which we really enjoy doing. Even though we may enjoy doing these things we may not necessarily be the best person to do it and it may not be the best thing to do right now. Then there is also the tendency to do the easiest tasks first. It may mean you can tick a box but it doesn’t mean it will get you any closer to your end goal. In fact, it may make it harder. The consequences of these choices may mean more work in the long run.

I relate these tendencies to who we are as individuals. We all have functional systems within our brain and it is the favouring of certain systems which leads to the construction of our individual personalities. This will affect where we want to spend our time. I’ve had discussions with business owners who do not see the value in providing their employees with role clarity. Meanwhile, their employees are crying out for role clarity, wanting to know who is doing what. Therefore, these business owners may not strongly favour the functional system which relates to role clarity, part of the first step in creating a high performing team.

Are you working on the right things, in the right order for the benefit of your business? Are you sure?