Health checks aren’t just for humans….
In all the new year, new you, new job excitement I wondered how many of us are taking a moment in our busy lives to audit the health of our businesses?
As well as thinking about your personal or team goals and the new decade of greatness, are you operationally set up for success in your business today? How healthy is your operation currently?
If you took a moment to look at the overall organisation and assessed what’s working? what’s not? what’s standing in the way of greatness? A simple ‘Health check’, what would it look like? What would you uncover that could improve your organisational performance? What could you ‘tweak’ that could unlock your people power and possibilities this year and perhaps add even more growth over the next 5?
Organisational effectiveness models scrutinise everything from the business strategy to decision making, core processes and technology, to your leadership teams and behaviours, to name a few. As much as these formal exercises add long term value and provide confidence for a sustainable future, you may not be able to invest in these strategies right now.
A ‘health check’ for your business is a simple way to audit how healthy it is today. A moment to think about what ‘diet’ or small change you can make, to move from where it is to where you aspire it to be.
A health check enables you to feel confident that your business model is fit for the future, that you have the right people in the right place at the right time, or at least provides a clear understanding of the reality which you can proactively consider as you plan forward. The outcome may provide confidence that you do have the right structure, key processes, behaviours that will deliver your vision. You may even identify small ‘tweaks’ that may make your goal accomplishment easier!
If a full-blown organisational effectiveness initiative is not possible right now, there are a few things that could make a difference to your business performance to unlock a little more of the power of your people to make life easier and improve performance:
1. What is the biggest barrier or challenge that you see that if unlocked, could provide the biggest positive impact, return on investment, improvement to performance, something you can control? What could you do to improve it?
2. Who are the change champions? Who else could be feeling the same as you? Could they help you thrash out the facts and potential solutions to address the challenge? Is there a group of like minds ‘an improvement tribe’ that feel the same pain? Who are they and what are their thoughts? What could you do together?
3. What must be true? Once you are clear on the what needs to change and who can support it, what else needs to be true to implement the solution? What specific change would be necessary? Who else would you need support from? Would there be any cost implications? What resources would you need? What are the benefits of making the change?
4. What would the naysayers say? How would you respond? Be prepared with clarity of the benefit and to whom, as well as the opportunity cost to not changing. Perhaps spend time understanding the potential push back, refine the solution so that it’s a win win.
5. What can you do? Present your proposal to your boss. Share the what, why, where, who and how and the benefit. Offer to do the same presentation to others, if required. What will it take to move the proposed solution forward to implementation? To make a positive improvement.
Being able to perform a more thorough ‘Health check’ or review of the overall organisational effectiveness would be the ultimate goal, if not, taking bite sized chunks and making improvements along the way is a great start and who knows, what power you may unlock!
If you need some help to get you started let’s have a virtual cuppa to see how I can help you unlock the power of your people.
