Alan’s 12 Consulting Focus Areas
I presented this as food for thought at the Million Dollar Consulting College® Grad School. They are a dozen areas of very common focal points to improve organizations. The list was kindly compiled by Betsy Waits.
Alan’s 12 Consulting Areas
Areas that we can focus on from time to time that you can rely upon to improve:
1. The Leader as avatar. The leader is really a super role model. No one believes what they read or hear—only what they see. The leader has to walk the talk and talk the walk.
2. Silo busting. Silos cause people to go “up and over” to communicate. People sometimes don’t even know the silos are there impeding them.
3. Strategy/tactics confusion. Strategy and tactics are two different things and have nothing to do with time (long-term vs. short-term). Strategy has to do with the direction of the business and tactics have to do with execution. Sit in a strategy meeting and someone has a strategic point, but someone may kill it with a tactical barrier.
• Strategy – framework within which decisions are made which set the nature and direction of the business.
• Tactics – involve what it takes to implement the strategy
• Mission – reason for existence
• Core values and operational values have to align or else you have cognitive dissonance
• Vision – picture of the future
4. Eliminate endless meetings. Endless meetings (eliminate frequency and duration)—we can remove 90% of meetings in organizations because they are used pointlessly to disseminate information. Most meetings can be very short if you don’t assign arbitrary time frames for duration.
5. Talent leaves people, not organizations. Who are they leaving and why are they leaving those people?
6. Not learning from the front-line. Organizations learn from the people who work from them at point of customer contact.
7. Poor/infrequent performance evaluations. These are notoriously connected to salary increases and they shouldn’t be. Should be frequent and informal, written quarterly with employee participation and self-evaluation, disassociated with salary increases.
8. Over-reliance on consultants. A lot of executives bring in consultants instead of doing the hard work themselves. Bring in consultants so they can blame when it goes wrong or find someone who simply parrots their own ideas.
9. Focus on input, not output.
10. Focus on contingent action, not preventative. Preventative action saves time, money and embarrassment every time.
11. Assuming clients know what is needed. They know what they want but they don’t what they need because their nose is too close to the glass.
12. Focus on top line growth, not solely profit. Can’t grow unless top line grows. You can’t cut your way to success.
© Alan Weiss 2009. All rights reserved.
Mark
Alan, a question about #7, performance evaluations. Are you suggesting that the quarterly evaluations should be focused only on improvement/feedback, but that there should also be a formal annual evaluation that determines salary increase? Or am I reading this wrong?
Thanks,
–Mark
Alan Weiss
There should be quarterly evaluations that are formal and interactive, so that if there are annual merit increases, the amounts come as no surprise to someone who has been consistently evaluated and whose views have been constantly heard. Personally, I would never hold an evaluation session and then hand out a bonus check or inform someone of a merit increase (or lack of them). I knew an international manager who never gave evaluations until the “bonus visit” in December, and he would then simply hand an envelope the his subordinate as he departed at the airport. That isn’t management, it’s sadism.
Ian Brodie
Alan,
Can you expand on the “Talent Leaves People, Not Organisations” point a bit?
Thanks
Ian
Alan Weiss
People seldom leave an organization. They generally leave because of their direct superior or some other influential person who makes their lives miserable or unfulfilling. If you want to improve retention, find the patterns among the people who leave.