And Why You Can’t Seem to Fix It.
In today’s challenging business climate, it is hard enough to maintain and even grow your business. But there are five areas that you have complete control over, which you are probably failing at. Following are the top five reasons that most organizations are stuck, and likely can’t get themselves out of the current economic calamity.
5. Your personal problem-solving skills are outdated: You are attempting to navigate your way out of this business climate using the same old approaches that worked before but won’y any longer. We live in unchartered times. The challenges we face are unique, and can’t be solved with yesterday’s solutions. It’s not enough to lower prices, fix operations, or lay off staff. In a climate in which our business, political, educational, and financial institutions are all broken we simply CAN’T continue to pursue business-as-usual approaches.
4. You haven’t aligned your core business functions: Face it, you do not develop your sales, marketing, product development and customer care efforts in isolation of one another. Your management team continues to treat these as stand-alone, separate entities when in fact they are all intertwined and need to be planned and budgeted for as a single entity.
3. Your strategy is no longer relevant: You continue to implement a strategy that was developed at an earlier time before circumstances changed so drastically. Marketplace conditions such as the rate of technological change and globalization of business & industry are changing at such a rapid pace that strategies cannot be applied beyond 3 to 4 month cycles in most industries.
2. You don’t know your customers: You continue to sell to your existing customers without truly understanding the challenges they face. When was the last time you took a top revenue client out for breakfast? Do you periodically join your top clients for a ride along, to shadow them for a day to learn their business and challenges they face? Have you conducted a lifetime value assessment to determine your most (and least) profitable accounts? Do you have a strategy to grow repeat business with existing clients and covert your repeat customers into apostles?
…and the #1 reason you can’t “unstick”your business in these turbulent times:
1. You treat your employees like “disposable assets”: Instead of elevating your people to their rightful place as your organization’s most valuable asset, you treat them like a commodity. You conduct periodic layoffs, and expect their loyalty to remain steadfast. Have passionate are you about constantly soliciting feedback from your people on how to improve your organization. Do you provide them with the autonomy, training and resources to make decisions independently? Do you have an idea generation program?
Do you reward and recognize your people? Coach and mentor them? Have you performed a human capital audit to match every one of your people’s core competencies with their job responsibilities? Do you constantly challenge your people? What about providing a great workplace? How often do you provide feedback? Do you have a 360-degree performance review program?
Until you unleash the tremendous untapped potential of your workforce, you will not be able to compete in today’s changing global business climate.