Leadership Tips for Growing Businesses

Hit Business Targets by Learning From Growing Companies

Aug 20, 2009 Becky Warren

Most companies have goals to grow, expand, and make more money. Learn from these companies that know what their goals are, but just cannot hit their target.

There are hundreds of books, articles, and business school lectures that help companies get to their next level of success. These tools all have similar concepts: clearly identify the goals, communicate the goals, check in on progress, communicate some more and reward when they are achieved.

Many times organizations will pay big money for coaches and consultants to provide these simple tools. If these organizations can see the goal, know what they need to do, why do they continue to fail? Here are a few true examples of action (or lack of) that prevent good companies from excelling to the next level.

Goals are Great, How about a Plan?

It is common for businesses to take their senior decision makers, have an all day session to plan their goals for the quarter, year and frequently five years. Most successful organizations do this. But what happens when you leave the meeting? Does the team communicate to their team the goals? What individual’s responsibilities does each employee have to meet the goals? Most importantly, what do they earn in return if they do succeed to meet the goals – raise, bonus, pizza party?

Everyone has their motivation. Business managers and leaders do not need a MBA to recognize the importance of follow-up action. Small companies stay small because they leave the meeting pumped and enthusiastic about the future, then quickly get drawn back into their daily lives of running their department and do not check in on their goals.

Taking the advice a well paid consultant, a small manufacturing company went off site for a day to plan their quarterly goals. They were so energized by putting goals on paper, they gathered the company’s personnel that same evening to announce the effort. They told the company that if they meet the goals, there would be an extra paid holiday! Cool, right? Who wouldn’t be motivated by a day off?

After this exciting announcement, they didn’t listen to their well paid consultant, and there were no further actions taken to address the goals – no action plan, posting of the goals, tracking performance. It just died. As a result, by the end of the quarter the leaders couldn’t remember what the goals were! There results didn’t match the efforts they orginally announced. Imagine how tough it was to sell the organization the next set of goals? They no longer had a captivated audience, not to mention, credibility. They missed their target.

This organization needed to meet regularly to review the goals at department levels and leadership levels. They had an opportunity to communicate, measure and communicate again. They missed out by not leveraging the simple tools provided to them by their consultant.

Review Key Indicators to Stay on Target, or Not

The purpose of identifying goals and target numbers is to have key performance indicators to assess the health of a company. Strong teams will review these numbers in their staff meetings; identify where there is a deviation from course, than make steps to correct. That’s team work. Well how does an organization mess this up? Want to stay small? For one, avoid reviewing the numbers all together. Why act on the lessons learned from all those smart consultants and business books?

One company that is perplexed on why they can’t break their revenue barrier has this down. This consumer goods company had daily meetings to review production and sales numbers against the goals. This is a great step and should be practiced by serious companies. In this case, as each department reviewed their numbers half of the group were on their Blackberries (including the president) and the others were not engaged.

Why should they be engaged? If the president of the company doesn’t find it important, why should they? During the meeting not one person questioned the numbers, which were clearly showing that they were off target on sales and production. No one asked, “Why are we were missing our numbers?” “What can we do to change it?” Nothing… silence. They said just said to the speaking director, ”Ok, thanks for the update.” As if he just made an announcement about the Xerox being out of paper.

This scenario is partially a flaw in the leadership, but is a true case were a group received great advice from nationally known business groups and didn’t execute against it. The numbers tell a story that either progress is being made and businesses should continue their plan, or something needs to change.

Meet your Goals and Grow your Business

The formula to improve and grow has been packaged and taught many ways in the business world. Establish goals, create a plan, reward success, communicate, and communicate a gain. Small companies become big companies by sticking some of these basic guidelines and staying focused on how they can impact the goal.

The copyright of the article Leadership Tips for Growing Businesses in Business Management is owned by Becky Warren. Permission to republish Leadership Tips for Growing Businesses in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.