To ‘make it happen’ in your business you have to:

Managing And Motivating Yourself

In your business, you are the key resource. You therefore need to manage yourself very carefully to ensure you use yourself as efficiently and effectively as possible. The key areas to address, and some business approaches appropriate to those areas, are as follows.

Self-Motivation And Time Management

Visualisation

Take your list of goals. Make a collage of pictures illustrating each measure of success (that fast car, the golf clubs, the family, the pile of money, the holiday). Hang it in your office where you see it every day.

Make it real

Commit yourself to achieving some small short-term goal by paying the deposit for the holiday in six months. As you achieve your goals, put a big red tick on the picture!

Measure

For the next two weeks, record for each 15 minutes what you have done. Put a cost on your time. How much has each activity cost you? What was useful and you should do more of? What was a waste of time and you should drop? What could be done more cost effectively or by someone else?

Prioritise

Take 10 minutes at the end of each day to plan the next day’s work. List all the tasks you want to achieve and group them by priority:

• Urgent and important (do).
• Urgent but not important (do, but don’t waste time on).
• Important but not urgent (make sure they are done before they become urgent).
• Not important or urgent (delegate).

 

Your ‘important’ priorities ought to tie into your overall objectives and goals. If you are carrying tasks forward day after day, this means:

• they are not important and you should be delegating them to someone else;
• your time is overloaded (and you need to delegate); and
• it’s a task you do not want to face up to/find time for (if so, what are you going to do about it?).

 

Be assertive

When you want things done try using the three part assertiveness mantra:

• What I like is . . .
• What I don’t like is . . .
• What I want is . . .

 

Understanding Your Business’s Structure And Culture

Some of the strongest forces operating within your business are its culture and structure but, because they have often grown up over time, they have never been formally set out. They form a pervasive background but this ‘wood’ is often all but invisible to those working inside the business who see only the ‘trees’.

Your business’s culture and structure are different but linked. The culture of your business is the shared values, experience and beliefs of the business that set out ‘how we do things here’:

• independently of management;
• informally; and
• including war stories, in-jokes, reputations, myths, etc.

 

The structure of your business is how it is organised:

• as set out by management;
• formally; and
• as perceived by the public (e.g. through organisation charts).

 

As businesses develop in size and complexity, cultural style and structure often develop along parallel lines from a power to a role culture and from an entrepreneurial to a functional structure (see Figures 35 and 36).

 

 

To help you to manage your people and business through a process of change, take a step back from your own business:

• Draw an organisation chart showing who formally reports to whom. How clearly structured is it? How logically organised is it?
• Take a different coloured pen and mark on your plan the lines of power – who goes to whom for decisions. Does this follow the ‘formal structure’? If not, why not? (For example, Fred is the factory manager, but all the lads on the shopfloor still come to you as ‘the boss’ for all the decisions.)
• Put a job title by everyone on your chart. Do they make sense given the lines you have drawn?
• For each of the key roles in your business, is someone shown as being clearly responsible for these?

 

There are two further business culture/structure pairings (see Figures 37 and 38).

 

These pairings tend to evolve in specialised circumstances. For example, in a major engineering operation, each client project may have a manager (A, B or C) whose job it is to manage the project on behalf of the customer by purchasing services from the business’s various departments, such as production, HR, etc.