•To learn more about Point North Networks, click here

•To learn more about Aligned Applications, click here

In my last article I illustrated the connection between Structured Operations and culture. I’d like to further focus on the effects of culture on the member experience. I use the term member to include employees, team members, or other individuals within any organization.

As we seek to develop a culture of clarity, confidence and trust, we should understand the impact it has on people within our organization. If we’re considering employees, how might their experiences differ between a culture of clarity, confidence and trust vs. that of confusion, doubt and drama?

I personally have had the experience of starting jobs in a couple of companies where the managers were not sure about what I should be doing on the first day or what my role in the organization really was.  This is a culture of “we’ll figure it out as we go.” This certainly didn’t instill trust in me. Without proper direction and reinforcement, I didn’t have confidence in my performance. Luckily, I like a challenge and was able to get things figured out.  I wonder though how elevated my success there could have been if I had been provided with a clear schedule, instructions for the work I was responsible for, and clear expectations of the anticipated results.

The primary role of the manager in any organization is to be focused on the experiences of each of the members of their team. Do they each understand the purpose and vision of the organization, do they have clarity in their work assignments, and can they count on their manager to be there when they need to get involved in a new and difficult situation?

At the end of the day, when a team member in your organization gets home, sits down for dinner and is asked by her husband “How was your day?” is the response most often going to be, “Great! I love my job.” Or will she dive into the details of the drama and uncertainty she faced that day. I wonder how excited their kids will be to get into the workforce after hearing tales of a manager that doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, doesn’t listen to repeated complaints or always seems disappointed in her work.

For a couple of quick videos on how you can build trust in your organization, click below:

How to handle a toxic culture - Simon Sinek

How Does Culture And Climate Fit With Your Work? - Simon Sinek

In a previous article I made the case for making recordings of remote and live meetings. But this is only part of my entire solution for getting the most out of meetings. The second part of my solution is Microsoft’s OneNote app.

In his book “Getting Things Done”, David Allen stresses the importance of having a place to store informative and effective records. This isn’t a to-do list, but a place to keep information that you’ll need to reference later. I took his advice and tried a few different solutions and OneNote has been working the best for me, by far. I recommend installing the most recent version, as the navigation is much better, and it allows for better page sorting.

I use OneNote in both my professional and personal life. I set up two different notebooks with two different Microsoft accounts. One is my 365 account for work and the other is a personal OneNote account. Once both Notebooks are setup it’s easy to jump back and forth.

For this article, I’ll focus on how I organize my work Notebook. The cool thing about OneNote is that it functions… well… like a notebook. It has pages that get organized into sections and there is also an option to further organize sections into groups. A few samples of my sections are “Personal Development,” “Roundtable Notes,” and “To Process.” Samples of Section Groups are “Client Meetings” and “Non-Client Meetings.” I then have a section in “Client Meetings” for each of my clients. Each meeting for each client has its own page. Before a meeting I add the following text fields to a new page:

Agenda – A list of objectives for the meeting.

Notes – Notes and action Items which arise from discussions.

Sidebar – These are notes which may not be relevant to the meeting; they are often brainstorm ideas I would like to record which are not strictly related to the agenda.

As you may remember from the “Record Your Meetings” article, I’ll often go back and listen to meeting recordings to fill in some blanks or verify my notes. The two solutions work wonderfully together

A good record keeping solution wouldn’t be worth using if you couldn’t easily find the information recorded in it. The organization I created in OneNote makes it easy to look up notes. Additionally, the search capability is well optimized and allows you to search within sections, or across your entire notebook.

I regularly access the information on my desktop computer, my tablet, and my phone. Most recently I took the plunge to try out the pen functions with my tablet, a Microsoft Surface. The writing experience is much better than I anticipated—the engineers really nailed the feel of a pen on the screen. For most of my work I type with the keyboard, but I could see the appeal and utility of using the drawing tools for virtual “white-boarding.”

If you’d like to know more about David Allen’s time management philosophies and methodologies, click here.

If you’d like to know more about how I use OneNote to keep my notes organized, drop me an email and I’ll set up a remote session with you: kelly@alignedoperations.com

I typically don’t get this granular in recommending tactical applications, but I feel this one is a game changer: record your meetings.

I recently started using the Meetings app in the ZoHo One suite of applications. It’s not the most feature-rich tool for managing and executing web meetings or seminars, but it has suited me well. I had been using the Meetings app for training clients in on a software system we use to align leaders, managers and their teams (Trellis Tools). One of the attendees couldn’t make it, so I offered to try the recording feature.

First of all, it is super easy to initiate a recording. Once you get going with the meeting you don’t even realize it’s recording (Which might be a good and bad thing, for those who are a bit too free with their words). I do get permission from anyone on the call to record our sessions--I also offer a link to the recording if they would like to review it afterward as well.

After recording our meetings a couple of times, I ran into a situation where one of the attendees had recommended a book and I forgot to make a note. I remembered that I had the recording, so I simply reviewed our conversation and was able to get the information I needed.

I then mentioned this to my college-aged son, and he responded with a story about a professor who recommends that students don’t take notes in his class. Instead, he implores them, just pay attention. Then he recommends that after class students should write down everything they remember. The professor also offers an outline of his lecture on the class portal to confirm the contents of their notes. The point being that we don’t pay close attention to the substance of the material while we’re taking notes. So now I record meetings and only take notes for action items or very important points. For in-person meetings, I start the app on my laptop and use the built-in mic to record--the audio quality has proven to be surprisingly good.

Most of the other remote session solutions (Zoom, Teams, WebEx) include a recording feature and I highly recommend you start the practice of recording your meetings and remote sessions. I recently discovered that Teams will even transcribe the audio into a searchable text.

This strategy did produce one unforeseen challenge; some of the requested attendees have been opting to skip meetings entirely, in favor of just listening to the recording later. I feel the lower level of “live” participation reduces the overall value of the session, so it is important to emphasize that while recordings are a good reference, they should not be a wholesale replacement for attending meetings.

For more information regarding ZoHo Meetings click here.

To learn more about Trellis Tools click here.

I’ve recently been working with several businesses that are struggling with owner partnerships. In my last article, I described the Visionary/Integrator roles and relationships within an organization. In this article, we’ll examine how the concepts and methodologies of structured operations can minimize “partnership pitfalls.” In far too many organizations, partnerships which begin with optimism and good faith are strained by tension, conflict and mistrust, as the organization grows, evolves and changes. Wouldn’t it be great to work in a partnership that is built on clarity, confidence and trust?

One result of implementing structured operation is the establishment of defined, clear roles throughout the organization. These roles and expectations will include the partners. Roles are based on the inventory of work (tasks) which have been identified in each department of the organization, along with benchmarks—indicators that tasks are being executed in a way that serves the overall goals of the organization. As I mentioned in the last article, the Visionary/Integrator in the executive team are often partners in the business and they will most likely be playing additional roles throughout the organization. It is vital that all of these expectations are clear at the creation of the partnership.

In many cases, the heart of the conflict within partnerships is compensation. Often the value of the work a partner is doing is in question, unclear, or otherwise difficult to quantify. This uncertainty can be addressed from the beginning by using the framework of the role descriptions to value each of the partners’ contributions. Setting benchmarks at the task level can support the assignment of the value of each partner’s individual contributions.

To keep an eye on performance, we recommend that a partner’s performance is evaluated no differently than the other employees within the organization. This includes following the support hierarchy. So, what about the Visionary who sits at the top of the organization? Who will complete their evaluation? In a formal corporation, the board provides oversight of the CEO, so they would be tasked with the evaluation of the Visionary’s performance. If the organization is less formal, the advisory board could complete this oversight, or an outside, impartial third party can be hired. This is a service that Aligned Operations offers.

Do you have clarity, confidence and trust in your partnerships? If your answer is no, consider implementing structured operations as a framework to determine each of the roles, set fair, market-driven compensation structures and guide the oversight of each partners’ performance in the future.

In my last post, I presented the perspective that strategic planning is pivotal to decision making in an organization. In this post, we’ll explore the most important decision of the Visionary: choosing the right Integrator.

So, what is the Integrator and what is their role within the organization? Often the Integrator role is fulfilled by the General Manager or the Operations Director.  I sum it up this way: “the integrator is responsible for balancing the organization’s capacity to produce/serve, against the demand”. Organizations typically fail when one side of the capacity/demand equation is too far out of balance.  This role to balance at the top of the organization takes a great deal of knowledge, knowhow and leadership. The primary traits of an integrator are:

·  Being able to translate the big picture into the nuts and bolts, attention to detail.

·  Pragmatism, leading with facts and statistics, an ability to stay tuned into the numbers vs emotion.

·  Risk Aversion.

The Integrator’s attention is inside the organization focused on "how". This allows the Visionary to make sure the purpose and vision of the organization fit into the marketplace.

I believe the most under-valued role in successful organizations is the Integrator. Often, in the small business world, finances may not allow for a dedicated person to have the single role of Integrator, so what else can be done? Often the Visionary shares both roles. I’ve seen it done successfully, but it takes a rare personality to be both a creative visionary and a pragmatic Integrator.

In a partnership situation, one partner often fills the Visionary/Sales role and the other is the Integrator/Production role. This split can go either way. This is a better option than having the Visionary take on both roles, but it can still leave both short of focus, time and expertise.

An additional option is to hire a fractional Integrator. This is a budget-friendly way to have an experienced integrator with a set of structured operation’s tools support and align the leaders and managers of the organization.

If you’d like to learn more about the Integrator and Visionary combination, see the book “Rocket Fuel” by Gino Wickman and Mark C Winters.

Every organization has limited resources (some more so than others). These include: cash, staff, knowledge/skill, time, space, technology, etc. So, what is the best use of those limited resource to move your organization forward.

I believe the three primary elements of an operations are structure, iteration, and oversight. My simple explanation of iteration is “to do the best with what you have to expand what you… then repeat”.

So, what is “what you have”. I regularly suggest to business owners to “take an inventory” of your organization, so you know “what you have”…what are your assets.

Once you know “what you have “, you can then decide how to “do the best with them”…this is strategic planning. The process of deciding includes evaluating the inventory you just took and determine what’s the most limiting factor to expand the organization. This limiting factor is often referred to as a bottleneck or constraint.

This bottleneck or constraint could be a bad process, an untrained person, a poor policy, etc. We often use data analytics to assist us in determining the most limiting factors. When in doubt, I ask “what is the task that everyone hates to do”. Often, that’s the bottleneck.

At the end of the day decision making in an organization needs to maximize the impact of the limited resources at each stage (iteration) of growth. I’ve heard the analogy of knowing which levers to pull and when.

If you’d like to learn more about bottlenecks and The Theory of Constraints, I’d recommend you read The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. I also found a few good YouTube videos on the topic: https://youtu.be/5HStf-XbsSo

Most businesses find that the calendar year-end is a good time to complete Annual Strategic Planning (ASP), Why should an organization complete an ASP? 

I’d throw out 3 questions for you to consider:

1.  Does your business serve you? (Are you fulfilled by the work? Does your compensation support you?)

2.  Are your clients/customers served? (Are they satisfied with your product/service? Are they your best evangelists?)

3.  Is your business stable? (Are the people in the organization fulfilled? Can you scale without breaking?)

If you answer no to any of these questions, you have 3 options:

1.  Accept and tolerate the drama that goes with it.

2.  Quit because you recognize the current limitations.

3.  Evolve through strategic planning.

There is no right or wrong answer, You just need to align with what you want your future to be.

I recently met with my grade school basketball coach (my guess is that it’s been about 40 years since I last saw him). The meeting was a great experience. I often question the value of Facebook, but it did facilitate this re-connection. As we reminisced about those glory days, he stated that the most significant wisdom that he drew from that experience was “cause and effect”. If we ran the plays well, we usually scored. If we were sloppy, it usually resulted in a turn over. He indicated that he’s now able to see that same “cause and effect” principle at play in his professional life.

I’ve thought a lot about that conversation and have started to make the “cause and effect” connection when talking with business owners and leaders. They express their frustration about their team’s poor performance, lack of growth or unhappy customers, yet they put little effort into overseeing their organization’s operations. Those leaders that invest in documentation, oversight, and strategic planning, typically have positive and predictable results.

This time of year, I really encourage business owners and leaders to take a step back and take an inventory of their organizations, set goals, and prioritize what needs improvement to reach those goals. At Aligned Operations, we call this an Organizational Alignment. Cause: Align your organization, Effect: a culture of clarity, confidence, and trust.

I think Elliot’s quote below speaks well to cause and effect:

“The most far reaching, dramatic and rapid changes in behavior of individuals in an organization can be achieved by changes in the organization – both in structure and in managerial leadership practices.”

-Elliot Jacques