Ben Fletcher Advisory Helping Startups

1 minute guide to managing change

If you are running a fast growing company, you will be doing lots of new things and having to change from the old way of doing things to the new way. This is a major headache. There’s a huge amount of inertia that means people tend to do things in the old way because they feel more comfortable with that.

However, there are some simple things you can do that will help the change process

1. Make sure everyone understands why the change is necessary. If you can’t clearly express the benefits to the business, it’s probably not worth doing. How does this affect the team undergoing the change? Why will it make things better for them? It’s very easy after a lot of thought and discussion about something new to assume that everyone will ‘get’ the idea quickly. This is rarely the case. If they can’t articulate the reasons and benefits in their own words they are unlikely to have really understood it. If you can get people to take ownership of the change, they are much more likely to make it happen.

2. Don’t rush out lots of changes at once. It’s very easy to sit in a meeting and come up with a long list of new things that you ought to be doing as a company, then dole out tasks to managers. Often this results in things getting half done or ignored as people can only take so much change. I know it is tempting once you have discussed how amazing your business will be after these changes to rush into them. After you have come up with your list, prioritise first (by whatever metric you prefer: quick wins might be a factor, biggest impact on profit, the need for new product, market share etc – just make sure you decide on the priorities). Then look at which projects overlap (involve the same people). Then you can start on the projects with the top priorities that affect only one group of people. As another note, if you have lots of meetings where you generate ideas, you are likely to run into difficulties unless you are always comparing them to your master list of priorities. If you are not doing this you just aren’t managing your business, you’ll always be working on the hot new idea.

3. Have a project leader/cheerleader. You need someone that is on the front line of the project that really ‘gets’ it, and can make sure everything is being implemented properly.

4. Have clear objectives that are measurable, and check on them. Don’t assume that just because you’ve had a great idea and explained it clearly that it will happen. You need to have regular checks. If people never feel they will be checked on, what’s to stop them taking the path of least resistance and carrying on doing things the same old way. Also, you need to check that the changes have been implemented correctly. Again, if you’re always focussed on the shiny new ideas, old change projects will just run out of steam and noting will happen.

If you follow these steps, you will start far fewer change projects, but get more completed. Remember, there’s a limited amount of time available – you can only get so much done in a given period of time. Starting more will not result in more work getting done. I like the story about the British general who said during WWII that our problem was we planned a battleship for a year and took four years to build it whereas the Japanese planned a battleship for three years and took one year to build it.

Worth bearing in mind!

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1 minute guide to running effective meetings

I don’t know how much time ineffective meetings lose annually, but I bet it’s a huge amount (and people complain about Twitter!). There are few things more irritating than having to constantly go to meetings where you are often not needed, decisions are rarely reached, and if they are reached not acted on.

Amazingly running effective meetings is incredibly simple and the little extra effort saves you ten-fold. If I had to pick one thing that would immediately increase a company’s productivity by 10%, it would be effective meetings.

So, how do you do it?

1. Think carefully who you invite - do they really need to be there?

2. Always write an agenda, explain why the meeting is necessary and what the end aims are. Some meeting ideas will die naturally at this point! Circulate the agenda with the meeting request so people that feel they have nothing to add can opt out in advance.

3. At the start of the meeting, reiterate the aims of the meeting, and think about how long you need to dedicate to each agenda item to get through the meeting in the allotted time

4. Make sure only one person speaks at once, and that they do not go on for too long. This generally requires a chair, and it can’t be a chairperson that exploits their power to go on and on about their own points.

5. At the end of each agenda item make sure you record what decisions have been taken, what actions result from those decisions, who is responsible for delivering them and by when. Take this opportunity to think about who else in the company will be affected and make sure they are informed.

6. Schedule reminders to follow up on the actions to make sure they have happened.

It really is that simple.

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1 minute guide to boosting initiative and innovation in your team

Everyone wants to have a team working for them that they can trust to get on and do the job, be full of new ideas, and not come to them every five minutes asking for help or approval. Some people naturally develop their teams this way, most of us have to work at it.

Some key things to watch out for

1. Make sure you recruit the right people in the first place. If you do not trust them from the beginning, you’ll watch them too closely, give them too much instruction and stifle their creativity. This is a vicious circle, because you do not trust them, you micro-manage, because they are micro-managed they don’t feel free to be creative.

2. When people come to you with suggestions, be very careful how you react. Maybe you’ve thought about their idea before and decided it wouldn’t work. Maybe you’ve tried it and it didn’t work. If your first reaction is to tell them that, they will just feel that you dismissed it. Listen to their suggestion carefully, ask them questions about it, check there isn’t a new angle you might have missed, then explain why you think it might not work, and listen to their response.

3. When you set out your plans for something new, do you ever get dissenting voices? These people are not necessarily being negative (although they might be), so listen carefully and make sure you understand why they are saying what they are saying. Often it takes great courage to tell the boss he is wrong, so these people may be your best staff, as they are showing they really care. If you never get dissenting voices, it is more likely that you have effectively taught people that there is no point dissenting than it is that you are right all the time.

4. Make sure that when people do something new that you recognise it – either directly to them or publicly (or both) – even if it didn’t work that well (provided it didn’t work well because it turned out not to be a good idea, not because it was poorly implemented).

5. When setting strategy, set principles and outcomes, not processes. If you set processes, people will just do what they are told even if it is not achieving the desired outcome. If you make people responsible for outcomes, they will innovate to achieve them.

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