Growing a business requires a specific set of leadership abilities. You need to manage the day-to-day while helping your team to execute better and be more efficient.
The key to successful business development lies in focusing on your main goals and then optimising your company’s routine in order to achieve those aims.
What are the five crucial leadership abilities?
We’ve spoken before about The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) – Five Key Leadership Abilities™ that are essential for business success in any industry. These include: the ability to simplify, delegate, predict, systemise, and structure.
Each of these attributes is necessary for a leader to manage and grow their company efficiently. Today, we will take a deeper dive into the fourth leadership ability of the EOS.
Watch our video about The Five Leadership Abilities.
The importance of systemising
Take a moment to consider whether you have a way of doing business. A company ethos and routine probably came to your mind almost immediately. We call this “systemising” your business.
You will find that systemising enables you to run a business better when you take the time to document processes and train your team on them. Opting to systemise can make your company more consistent, scalable and manageable while also increasing profits and ensuring all your team know what they need to do and how they need to do it.
How to approach systemising
The first step when beginning to systemise is to assess your company’s method of documenting tasks. Consider whether there is a single approach and if everyone actually follows it.
Often, if a business requires their workers to document each and every step, then the employees feel micromanaged, and may become non-compliant. The process can seem boring and tedious. The paperwork inevitably just ends up discarded in drawers or never opened and used.
Some businesses don’t have a specific approach to documentation at all. In this case, each employee might use their own method, making results inconsistent and less effective.
With either approach, you most likely won’t get the consistency and scalability you desire.
Employing the Pareto principle
Systemising your business allows all your employees to understand what the key processes are and how to follow them. You can use the Pareto principle to help you decide what these processes should be.
The Pareto principle is also known as the 80/20 rule. The idea is that you document 20% of your company’s processes which will give you 80% compliance or consistency.
Once you’ve identified the top 20% (six to eight core processes), then you want to create checklists – headlines and bullet points – for each process. Having a way of doing each process should make your business more efficient. Ask yourself: what can we eliminate or automate to make the process smoother and remove unnecessary labour?
In my experience, documenting processes and tasks benefits everyone in business. Checklists can also be motivating for employees as they see where they are in the process and what needs to be done next.
Documenting all your processes requires focused effort. A fellow EOS implementer shared the following formula:
S – they need to be simplified
W – in writing
A – agreed by all
T – train everyone
M – measured the effectiveness
E – evolved
The best person undertake this task is a team member with strong organisational skills, who loves to break down processes into logical steps.
When you systemise your processes, task completion and business growth is easily monitored and reviewed. Team members know what is expected of them and how to do it – they are able to get more done and be more efficient.
For more details on how to systemise your business, give us a call on +44 (0)7795 667480. We offer a free 90-minute meeting to explain how our system can help your company be get more done and be efficient.