In today’s episode of mind your own business, I want to talk about implementation velocity.
Think about all of the tea meetings that you have. The one-to-one and the huddles, all of the actions that arise from these meetings, how consistent are you and your team members at getting those things done on time.
Think about your 90-day plans, think about the project meetings that you have, think about the conversations that you have with team members, and the actions that come out of all of those things. Are you and your team consistently delivering when you’re supposed to?
So what are the main barriers to implementation velocity? Here are my top four. First of all lack of a proper system throughout the business. Many businesses don’t have a system that gives everybody in the business visibility of what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by, and who needs to do it. So think about all of the meetings that you’ve attended where you’ve got a couple of people jotting actions on a day book, a couple of people dressing stuff on scraps of paper. That doesn’t really lead to Great implementation velocity. This is something. That is critical if you want to speed up your implementation of tasks. It is a really good place to start.
Next up is accountability or lack thereof. If you have a culture where it is okay to turn up to the next meeting without having followed through on the stuff that you agreed to, people let things slide or forget about actions somebody agrees to do something, and you don’t challenge them when they don’t do it or if they’re half-ass it then this is an area that you really need to focus on. Hold people accountable, and a really good place to start here is with you, so you start by following through, and you will then pay that forward to your team members.
About what they can achieve in a short period of time, and consequently, meetings create massive actions and big old tasks, and because of that, people don’t get the things done that they need to. If you have a monster task that comes out of a meeting, it’s difficult for you to sometimes know where to start. What you want to do is you want to reduce friction; therefore, in any discussion where an action arises, identify small baby steps. Smaller goals give people Clarity, and smaller goals are also more achievable, and therefore it makes it easier for you to hold people accountable to completing them.
Finally, bottlenecking decisions, and I’m afraid as the business owner, you are the most likely person to bottleneck decisions because a lot of decisions will flow up to you. You might have a decision that’s sitting on your desk that could take you 10/15 minutes to think through an action and if you don’t action that, you could be stopping somebody in your team from doing two hours’ worth of work they can move something forward or progress the business.
Make sure that you are giving your team permission to challenge you on things where you are bottlenecking them from being able to progress. So those are the key obstacles that are impacting you and your all business’s ability to get things done the most, and more importantly, what can you do about it? Well, for a few ideas, stick around for the next episode.
