Scott Jeffrey » results

Value Productivity More Than Time

Scott Jeffrey — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:00:01 +0000

Why should you track how many hours employees spend at their desks when what you are really interested in is their success at innovating, making customers happy and growing the business?

In a fragmented, global marketplace, the concept of the nine-to-five job continues to become less relevant. You need to be interested in outcomes, not time clocks—in results, not efficiency. One can be efficiently busy yet ineffective at achieving results. Only results drive a business forward. The contribution of time alone does not necessarily help create a new customer or better serve an existing one.

Each person needs different conditions for creating. Some people prefer working from home; others prefer working at night. Realizing that some guidelines are needed, how flexible are you willing to become in the pursuit of a stronger, more profitable business? Financial service provider The Motley Fools offers unlimited vacation time as long as employees “do an amazing job” and meet deadlines.

The lesson: Track performance by innovative contribution rather than time on the clock.

The Ultimate Threesome

Scott Jeffrey — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:00:33 +0000

Did I get your attention?

In our get-it-done-right-now world, it’s easy to spend your time being ineffective—that is, doing something that won’t produce results or grow your business. Drowning in a monsoon of to-do lists and activities, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s meaningful and important.

To help keep perspective on the bigger picture, make sure you don’t confuse what we call “The Big Three”: Objectives, Strategies and Tactics.

1) Objectives lay out your target—your ultimate goal—the end picture. Wal-Mart’s primary objective is to offer the lowest prices, always.

2) Strategies establish your basic guidelines and provide a framework for thinking toward the end goal. Wal-Mart uses massive volume and amazingly efficient distribution systems to guarantee shoppers everyday low prices.

3) Tactics are the various methods you utilize to achieve your objectives. Promotions, campaigns, product placements and displays are all tools used in the development and deployment of tactics.

Most executives focus too much on tactics and not enough time on defining objectives and strategies. They don’t clearly define and differentiate between objectives, strategies and tactics.

If you focus exclusively on tactics, you might too easily abandon the objective just because your tactic didn’t produce results. When a coach loses a game, he doesn’t change the objective of winning the next game. He simply changes his approach after learning what he can from his prior loss.

Tactics often fail. You have to spend endless hours testing and retesting, refining and thinking about your tactics. But only after you clearly define your objectives and overall strategy.

(The original article BJ Bueno and I wrote about objectives, strategies and tactics for Idea magazine can be found here.)

Three Powerful Steps to Coaching

Scott Jeffrey — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:00:28 +0000

In the last post we reviewed tips to become a better mentor. Now, let’s look at coaching.

Every team leader of any project takes on the role of the coach. As with sports, the team with the best coach usually has the edge.

Coaching is an important responsibility of a leader. Compared to a mentor, a coach has greater accountability and provides more active, hands-on guidance along your professional journey.

Let’s review the three basic roles of the coach:

1) Take Inventory: Identify where your team is now.

A good coach lives by the dictum “Know thyself.” If you don’t know where you are, you can’t plot your course to any destination. What is your team’s current condition? What are your strengths? (Play to your strengths, not your weaknesses.) What’s the overall context of the competitive landscape?

2) Set Objectives: Determine where you want to go.

Obvious isn’t it? Yet frequently, this vital step is often overlooked. An effective coach spends a disproportionate amount of time clearly defining the end picture—what the project will look like at the end. A clear vision is paramount to leading a successful team.

3) Develop Strategy: Plot the optimal course to your end picture.

With the help of an experienced team, the coach crafts a pathway to success by identifying the key results and strategic actions that must take place in order to realize the ultimate vision determined in step 2.

Similar to mentoring, the better you are at coaching your team through these three steps, the more effective you will be and the greater the results you will achieve.

Five Surefire Ways To Be Uncreative

Scott Jeffrey — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:00:58 +0000

Creativity arises when the inner, psyche conditions and the external, environmental conditions are appropriate. Instead of focusing on how to be more creative, it’s often more rewarding to stop doing things that inadvertently hinder creativity.

Here are five things executives often do to block the creative flow.

1) Sit in front of your computer all day.

The muse is unlikely to visit while you are sitting at your desk aimlessly staring at your monitor all day. The muse has left the building, and frankly, you probably can do the same. Get up and go outside for a walk.

2) Ensure your day is full of distractions.

Information overload converges from every direction. Staying busy is easy; producing creative results is not. Too many executives sacrifice their innate creativeness in exchange for a relentless stream of demands. Block off time at work and minimize your distractions.

3) Read the same things you’ve been reading.

Reading the latest business book may not be the most valuable use of your time. You can end up chasing the latest trend while you perpetually fall behind in your industry. Be willing to explore ideas, fields, and disciplines outside your comfort zone and make connections back to what you know.

4) Get stressed and emotionally unbalanced.

Part of the challenge of living a life full of distractions is that it tends to activate the “survival self,” which shuts down access to the creative impulse. Learn to let go of negative emotions as they arise without getting “hooked” by them.

5) Assume creative ideas come from your head.

Creative geniuses throughout time have intuited that their ideas didn’t arise from themselves. Operate from a profound level of humility without the need to be the “creator” of your work.

The creative waters are within us; we need only crack the damn and witness the creative forces flowing of its own.

Conducting Effective Meetings

Scott Jeffrey — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:00:01 +0000

An organization of any size requires meetings. Meetings help different people with different job responsibilities cooperate to complete projects and achieve objectives.

But as Peter Drucker noted, an abundance of meetings is a sign of a diseased organization. If you conduct effective meetings, they will become shorter and less frequent.

Here are a few guidelines for conducting effective meetings:

Always clarify the objective of the meeting before you begin. Every meeting should have purposeful direction.
Not all meetings are created equal. Different issues require different time constraints and team members. Don’t block off an hour for something that can be knocked off in ten minutes.
Have a meeting moderator that guides the discussion toward the desired end goal.
Make meeting preparation a requirement. When participates come unprepared to a meeting they waste your time and theirs.
Use de Bono’s Six Thinking Hat method as an effective way to take individual personalities out of the equation, keep meetings running smoothly, and generate more ideas.
Read Aaron Shield’s Creativity in the Workplace and learn how to facilitate powerful brainstorming sessions with your team. (It’s free and available on audio and pdf.)

Conducting more effective meetings will give you more time to be effective in your job—more time to focus on the needs of your customers.

Excessive Meetings = Ineffective Organization

Scott Jeffrey — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:00:41 +0000

In The Effective Executive, Drucker notes that an excess of meetings is a clear symptom of “malorganization.” In observing this symptom across many big businesses, I can’t seem to find many healthy organizations.

Some executives believe back-to-back meetings define the modern business world. But as Drucker explains, “Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.”

Some executives are forced to work on weekends to get their “real work” accomplished.

“As a rule, meetings should never be allowed to become the main demand on an executive’s time. Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components,” says Drucker.

Meetings are obviously necessary because different people are responsible for different roles and job functions. They must cooperate and share information to get specific things done.

But if you’re spending most of your work week in meetings, how are you supposed to contribute to the organization and produce results?

Make meetings the exception, not the rule. Value the results your organization achieves, not the time spent discussing them.

Mastering Time Management in the Workplace

Scott Jeffrey — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:00:55 +0000

Time is an executive’s most cherished commodity. Yet we’re never taught how to effectively manage our time to achieve creative results.

Inspired by Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive, here’s our latest slideshow on how to increase your effectiveness at work:

Got Time?

(Slideshare.net is featuring this deck on their homepage today.)

Five Habits of the Effective Executive

Scott Jeffrey — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:30:50 +0000

Peter Drucker succinctly explains: “Effectiveness is a habit; that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned. Practices are simple, deceptively so; even a seven-year-old has no difficulty in understanding a practice. But practices are always exceedingly hard to do well … Practices one learns by practicing and practicing and practicing again.” (Italics are my emphasis.)

In The Effective Executive, what I consider a must-read for anyone who works in any organization, Drucker highlights five habits that executives must acquire to be effective:

Time Consciousness: Effective executives are aware of where they spend their time. (We’ll address this more specifically in another post.)
Outward Contribution: Effective executives focus on outward contribution to the organization, and ultimately, the customer. They gear their efforts toward results, not work.
Strength-Focused Mindset: Effective executives build on their own strengths as well as the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates. They do not build on weakness or start out with things they cannot do.
Measurable Results: Effective executives concentrate on the few critical areas where superior performance produces measurable results. (See A New Results Mindset at Work.)
Effective Decisions: Effective executives make effective decisions. The focus is on a small number of fundamental decisions that greatly impact the organization.

How well do you size up? Where can you improve your level of effectiveness?

Adopt a New Results Mindset at Work

Scott Jeffrey — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:00:43 +0000

The problem with most forms of planning—new business, project, marketing, financial, strategic or otherwise—is that the newly-minted plan often ends up as a complex web of to-do lists.

While this to-do-list-driven thinking may help distribute various activities to different team members, it does not necessitate the achievement of organizational goals.

As Peter Drucker explains, “Productivity for the knowledge worker means the ability to get the right things done. It means effectiveness. Knowledge work is defined by its results.” As is always the case with to-do lists: they drive towards actions, not results.

Results planning doesn’t require another internal document, but a mindset your organization can adopt. With this new mindset, you and your organization will:

Stay perpetually connected to a larger, shared vision
Evaluate complex problems with higher understanding
Conduct shorter meetings (this is benefit enough!)
Make smarter, quicker decisions
Be more effective at operating as a collective whole, serving your customers, and growing your business

How do you adopt a Results-Planning mindset?

Continuously ask the question: What is the result we are going to achieve? Cultivate a culture that values investing time envisioning the big picture instead of jumping into an endless series of to-do-list driven activities.
Next, ask: What are the conditions that need to be set in order to realize our desired result? Now, brainstorm and strategically think through the issue while keeping the end result firmly in mind.

While these two questions might seem simple, consistent and effective execution is extremely difficult.

But here’s the good news: Any progress you and your organization make towards a Results-Planning mindset will measurably improve your business over time. (I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the positive effects with over a dozen enterprises I’ve worked with.)

The Death of To-Do Lists and the Birth of Creativity

Scott Jeffrey — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:41:26 +0000

Our culture’s love for busyness dominates our lives. From high school and beyond, we’re socially conditioned to think in terms of to-do lists, tasks, and checklists.

While a checklist for groceries can be useful when food shopping, using to-do lists in your business activities is not only inefficient, but it often plants the “seed of your own destruction.” To-do lists guarantee busyness without necessitating achievement and results.

There’s nothing “wrong” with being busy. In fact, as a quality of consciousness, it’s innate to our humanness. If we are unable to transcend this primal ego drive, however, we greatly limit our creativity. The general lack of creativity in the majority of mankind is a testament to this animalistic drive.

Locked in this endless pattern of activity, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the “big picture” perspective. High-level evaluation and doorways to creative inspiration are closed to the person overwhelmed by continual activity.

The wise transcend the survival instinct that often hinders our ability to manifest creatively.

Spend less time asking What do I need to do next? and invest more time connecting, exploring, and clarifying the bigger picture. If you do, you’ll find the to-dos tend to take care of themselves effortlessly.