Short Tip Of The Week – Systems
Systems are your way of empowering your team to do large parts of your job just as if you were doing it personally. They can reduce your hours and stress by getting all the team to do a great job…sounds fantastic? Well it is easy once you know a couple of tricks…
• Only write systems that make money (or reduce a big risk)
We are not in the business of creating manuals so only create asystem if it simplifies a task, improves quality or speeds up a service. This will keep you focused.
Forget your big company or corporate experience of many volumes that mainly gather dust. The trick is to start small and let it grow with time.
• Work until it becomes simple
If the system is complex then keep working! When you really understand something and present it well, it will become simple and therefore effective. Written procedures can often be best presented as checklists or tables.
• Make sure your precious systems are being used!
As you create systems, build into them monitoring processes so that at a glance you can see if they are being used. Changing the culture of your company takes time and there will be failures. Even when the culture has changed it needs to
be maintained. Your monitoring systems will do a lot of this for you.
• Make sure your team members know the positions they play
Unfortunately, it is normal for most team members to disagree on what needs to be done while at the same time believing everyone knows their roles.
Clear written and agreed roles will remove the need for 75% of systems. So start there.
By now you truly understand the best systems look very unimpressive… the genius is getting them to look that way.
Oh – and get some help when you are building systems – the wheel has well and truly been re-invented enough!
Go sell something!
James