If your whole team is flat out, but you’re making slow progress

You don’t have a time problem — you have a traction problem

Sometimes, busyness can hide what’s really going on in a business.

If your team is stretched, if everyone’s running at 100 miles an hour, if everyone has full calendars and everyone’s genuinely trying their best, but you are not achieving the results, if you’re not making progress, then something is wrong. Now, it could sometimes feel like the thing that is wrong is that you do not have enough time, or that you do not have enough resources, but often that is not the case. Often, there’s a lack of traction. And in my experience, there are three main reasons that cause this lack of traction.

1. Misaligned goals

The first one is misaligned goals, and this happens when a whole bunch of people in the business have different goals, different things that they are focused on for their own reasons. And that happens because the business owner and the management team haven’t set out and haven’t agreed on what the goals are for the business. And further to that, they don’t have a proper execution plan or 90-day plan where they can set those goals out to make it visible and to keep it top of mind. And, therefore, what happens is that you have everyone just focusing on what they think they should be focusing on.

You need to ensure that there is complete alignment across your management team, and you need to ensure that that management team is cascading those goals down through to their department, so that everybody in the business understands what the key goals are and why they are important.

2. Lack of proper prioritisation

The second reason is that often businesses lack proper prioritisation. Now, it will feel like at any point in time, there’s going to be like 150 different things that you want to fix or sort out or change in your business. The trouble is that you can’t do all 150 things at the same time. And because some businesses don’t have a 90-day plan, or they don’t have a mechanism for being able to prioritise, people are just trying to do everything, and they’re stretching themselves too thin. And instead of doing three or four things properly, they are trying to do 25 things and making very, very slow progress.

Prioritisation is essential. Your job is to understand the difference between what must get done and what could get done. Prioritisation is important because you need to focus on the most important thing, then the second most important thing, and the third most important thing, and make sure that you use your resources and your people accordingly.

Prioritisation is so so important. If you are an optimist, if you are a real go-getter, then you risk trying to prioritise everything at the same time. You can’t have 10 priorities.

You need to have a focus of power and two or three key priorities that you are focused on at any specific point in time.

3. People buried doing stuff

And the third reason is that people are buried doing stuff, and they are buried doing that stuff because it is a habit. They’re doing that stuff because somebody taught them to do that stuff. They are doing things that computers could do, or AI could do, or machinery could do. They’re doing things that don’t move the needle. They’re getting bogged down by stuff. And one of the things that you need to do as the leader is to help your team identify what stuff is getting in the way.

What activities are just pointless and absorbing loads and loads of time, and taking people away from the things that really matter, like driving growth, or looking after the customer experience, or coming up with new ideas and innovations? You need to identify all of that wasted time. Ten minutes a day of wasted time on doing stuff equates to one week a year in lost productivity. If you have 50 people in your business doing 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour of stuff — imagine the waste in that business. Imagine the wasted wage bill.

Imagine all of that time that could be spent doing things that actually move the needle.

The problem with all of this

The trouble with all of this is: if you are busy and you’re not getting the results, your business will lose momentum. You need your team members to feel like they are making progress. You need forward momentum. It is absolutely critical in a small business. And if people have goals that are all over the place, and they’re trying to do everything instead of prioritising, if they’re doing a whole bunch of stuff, all of that is going to sap energy, and people will start to burn out.

And they don’t have the benefit of seeing progress to get them through those tough days.

Now, don’t get me wrong — not all progress is linear.

It’s not that you’re always going to have big successes and massive days, even when you’re doing the right stuff.

What we’re talking about here is for those of you who know everyone’s flat out, you’ve been flat out for a while, but fundamentally, something is not right — you’re not working on the right stuff.

This video is for you if that makes sense to you.

The challenge

So the challenge that I have for you is: turn this on its head. Sit down with your management team and work with your management team to start identifying what you are doing as a team that is not moving the needle.

Get focused on very clear outcomes. What are the key KPIs that we need to drive, and what are the things that we need to focus on to move those needles?

That is how you get out of it. This is a very, very important thing for you to get right.

Often, adding more bodies and more resources to a chaotic situation or a system that’s not set up properly is a bad idea. It’s going to make your problem worse, not better.

Final message

See you next time on “Mind Your Own Business.” Uh, just before you go, quick favour if you don’t mind. If you enjoy these videos, if you’ve watched these videos and they’ve helped you in your business, please can you subscribe to our YouTube channel? It would mean a lot to me because it’ll help me spread the word and get in front of more business owners.

So go on — do it now.