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20210104

Want to save 2021?

There is one thing sure about 2021. We need to be more flexible than ever. Being flexible starts with listening and learning. Both on personal and organisational level. Are you ready for this, have you done the scenario work in order to make 2021 the best year ever?

Covid-19 caused trouble to most businesses. The recovery is likely to start in Q2 in 2021. That means a lot of new opportunities for those who prepare for it. Even you would be happy to maintain your status quo as it has been. Very few things will return to what they have been. This is a threat to some, this will mean that some companies will vanish from the market. Some, as we have already seen, will actually come out of the Covid-19 season as great winners. If you don’t plan and prepare for that, then it will not be you. Your destiny is what you choose it to be.

Let me tell you a short story of preparing for a new era. A customer of mine is in the restaurant business. As the Covid-19 hit the society, she went the very first day to her wholesaler to buy take away packages. They launch quickly a social media campaign to let their customers to know that they will be served. Her recovery plan for post Covid-19 includes 3 solutions; A) to make take-away a totally new experience to the customer B) to create a new way for home delivery and C) to upgrade the restaurant in order to answer the new need for feeling safe in public places. Recovery is really about thinking how your customers want to be served in the future. The new solutions will also open up new opportunities for those, who are open to look for them.

The biggest power preventing you from making 2021 the best year ever, is not the market. It is not Covid-19 or Brexit limiting business opportunities. The limiting force is your own beliefs and thoughts. If you focus on the problems, you create extra stress to yourself. Stress is the most powerful force in limiting our ability to adapt and develop. When we are stressed, our brains choice is to fight doing the old stuff or flee. Neither are solving the situation nor creating something new. If you notice that you are thinking “there is nothing we can do”, then you know you are under stress. Very few of us can leave that state of mind without external force.

Ways to move forward do always exist. As a member of the Business Mentors Finland (a pro-bono organization with over a 1000 specialist nation wide) I hear all the time stories of turn arounds. I have also seen my mentees finding novel solutions and hence saving their businesses (and sometimes also their families). This happens in all lines of business. As soon as you choose to look at your business from a distant and external perspective, you will see some unique strengths you can build your future on. Like they say “it is not what you have, but what you make of it”.

Saving 2021 and perhaps converting that to be your best year ever starts with asking yourself a couple of questions. First, what was the reason you originally did set up your business / take up the position you are in now. Don’t settle for the first answer, go for the root cause. Is that answer truly relevant today? Be honest with yourself, after all times have changed and so have you. Only after you have answered those, it is time to look for the optional roads to fulfillment of your mission and goal. Yes, in some businesses carrying on with the business as usual can be the answer. But even these must be on alert, as there is so much people and organizations working on challenging all old operators, operations and status quos.

Do some work on scenarios; A) what is someone comes to business area with some new version of doing business (ie. new way of connecting with and serving restaurant customers B) what if someone revolutionizes restaurant customer service (ie. builds a restaurant where every customer becomes involved in making their meal C) what if the whole industry enters a chaos stage (ie. restaurants will not be allowed to serve customers in any of the old ways)? Build you own scenarios for you line of business. Do this regardless of whether you have your own business or you are working as a leader in some company. What is you organizational recovery plan? What is your personal recovery plan? And foremost, what is your strategic choices in order to come out as a winner under different scenarios?

Yes, there is some work to be done. And the future is not happening, as we plan or hope (I’d presume very few of us hoped for a pandemic). The point and value in making the plans is that once you have created the skill of working with scenarios, you can do that much more easily when something happens. Just like in Covid-19, there were those who were reacting fast and wer able to make the situation a good one. That requires some adaptability, strength to accept novel ideas and challenging questions from other people.

There are two types of entrepreneurs. There are those who start the business and there are those who make the business successful. There are clear and measurable features in personality in those, who succeed on the long run. The first step is to learn what you have. And if you are short of something, then to get the proper type of person to support you. If you want to learn more, just drop me a line and I will tell you abit more through a video.

In leadership positions there are six types. Not all are good in dealing with turmoil. There is one type, which will kill the business for sure. And there are two types of leadership, which have high risk of leading the organization to perish. If you don’t know by now, what is your type and hence your opportunities for survival and recovery, drop me a line. I will share a video with you, which open up the situation a bit more..

Your partner in making success happen, Kari I. Mattila, emotional intelligence advisor

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20210607

Measure right

I was reading an article about one of the most hated companies in Finland. Caruna, company taking care of electricity distribution. The history is interesting, but irrelevant here.

The thing that was interesting in the article was about measuring the business. They knew that people hated them. That went all the way to level of parliament. And that was crucial. Because Caruna is operating in the business, which is regulated by the parliament. Old measures and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) had taken them where they were, in trouble. Caruna needed some insight to what the situation was, in order to make smart moves in the future. They had to have the courage and wisdom to ask new questions. In order to do this, they asked research organisations for offers on innovative research.

Caruna got a totally new approach to how to learn what, and even more importantly why, people were feeling. The important lesson here is that they needed to walk away from the old measurements in order to build successful future. The “old school” KPI’s take you only so far. In contemporary world the standard business measures have two major problems. The first one is that they see the world in a very mechanist way. That leaves most of the human factors out of the picture. The second problem is that using the old measure often leads to limited thinking. The more we have been looking at the figures, the less likely we are to look at alternative ways, reasons and implications. It does not have to be like that. Making a habit of bringing in new approaches or looking at the core figures from new standpoint will help you to learn more about your organisations, your customers and people you serve.

We cannot manage a huge amount of information with true in-depth understanding. We are have the fear of missing out. So giving up some measurement is not easy. Yet we should do that every time we bring in some new measurement. At each level we should have some 2 to 4 KPI which we monitor constantly and year over year. And the we should have a couple of measures, which we use for a couple of years. And then we should let them go, or if they turn out to be truly vital on long term, then we need to think which of the old permanent measures we let go. And let go you must. If you have 20 KPI’s, then they all become irrelevant and lose their power!

When you create, at each level of the organisation, 3 KPI’s on each of the following, then you are on right, prosperous and well being, track. The first and easy one is the financials. What is the KPI which has value and which people truly can have on impact on in their work. That is the KPI #1. Your KPI #2 is personnel well being and satisfaction. After all, like Richard Branson has said “take care of your people and they will take care or your customers”. The last KPI, #3, you need to have is customer satisfaction, either external or internal. With these you already get a huge set of information, when you take ratios like KPI#1 / KPI#2 or KPI#1 / KPI#3. And so on. When you put add on top of these a few contemporary measures, you will have all the information you need. Measures have also meaning to your people, which leads to better performance. Right measurement have value to your best talents. Hence your organisation will be able to keep and develop the best in the industry.

Get your people to create and innovate measures. Some of those measures will be almost useless. There is value in all of them, as they help people to learn to find better ones. Don’t be afraid to let go of a measure very fast, when you all see that it has no true value. Learning new things through new measures is the key element of all successful organisations. Measures are the source of learning and preparedness for changes, your organisational resilience. We are living in a world, where the cycle of change is shorter than ever. Your measurements need to give you tools to lead your through the stormy weathers of the world. The more you use variable measures, the easier it becomes to you to see the changes in the environment.

They say that in flying there are only three things that really matter; fuel, air under wings and direction. If any of those is missing, the end is catastrophe. In organisational context those 3 are employees, customer and money. Use your measuring system for making sure that you manage them right. In flying, even there are only 3 things to look after, they have a huge amount of measures and tools, just to ensure that they key measures are not giving clouded information. This is the purpose of your variable measures. They ensure that the core KPI’s give you right information.

There is one thing, which often limit our ability to use measures right! That is our emotional structure. We (because our brain does not like changes) tend to focus on only very limited volume of information. And we interpret them in the way we have done in the past. It is all about the culture you have and create. In creating culture you use your emotional intelligence, your personality. You need to have the culture of curiosity, learning and openness in order to use measurement results right. Numbers don’t lie, but they also don’t deliver anything until our mind gives them meaning. Give meaning and you get results!

When you want to learn more about your business and want to take it to improvement path, then you can use external specialist. That is the tool all the worlds leading organisations do. Today, in Finland, you can do it through using ELY-analysis services. There you get an external specialist to work with you. If you’d like to know more, send me an email. I will help you (at no cost) to take the first steps!

Kari I. Mattila, measurement lover, emotional intelligence trainer

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