CEOs traditionally seek to improve results by identifying the crucial key performance indicators (KPI) and focusing on them.
I advocate an additional approach that has stood the test of time over the past 24 years with my CEO clients.
Apart from the KPI, we focus on five areas, your Business Vortex™, creating an app dashboard to collect and monitor progress data:
- Attitudes, Behaviours and Conversations (ABC) – for the biggest impact.
- Meetings Discipline – following specific processes for specific types of meetings.
- Deep Alignment – firstly of the leadership cohort, then everyone.
- Effective Delegation – using my Complete Delegation Framework that all members know and use, not just leaders and supervisors.
- Coaching by Leaders – making sure the business is right sized so that leaders and supervisors have the right amount of time and skill to coach their people to be great at achieving the best results.
I call those five areas the Business Vortex™, because it’s from where all thoughts, words and actions that make things happen originate and are deployed.
The KPI measures are reflected in the 90-day plan area of the app dashboard.
The people in the business already have the specific skills needed to deliver their service or products, and because the leaders are coaching their people, they will know when and what further development may be required in those areas.
Now the CEO has a simpler method of tracking results, by paying attention to those five areas and actual results.
By paying attention to your Business Vortex™, you will rapidly improve your culture, performance and productivity.
It will show up in your results.
The most difficult area is the ABC, where I normally provide the most help for my clients.
I have developed clear, concise processes for meetings, alignment, delegation, and coaching that my clients can follow easily.
Take this complimentary short quiz to check the health of your Business Vortex™. You’ll get my report with recommendations you can act on.
Here’s a case study:
Unidata is the manufacturer and provider of a range of scientific measuring instruments in Perth, Western Australia.
The General Manager, Matt Saunders, was experiencing reduced performance and productivity from staff and asked me to help.
I did an assessment of the business paying attention to attitudes, behaviours and conversations; the quality of meetings, the extent of alignment, the quality of delegation and whether the leadership team were actually coaching their people to be great.
These were my findings:
- There were some attitudes and behaviours that were stopping staff from cooperating and collaborating, creating tension and stress.
- They couldn’t have conversations that resolved issues.
- Their meetings were not consistently effective.
- Key people weren’t as aligned as they thought they were.
- Delegation standards were inconsistent leading to instances of confusion and wasted effort.
- In line with not being able to have effective conversations, key people were unable or too busy to coach others, leading to disengagement and uneven workflow.
I then delivered what became the Vortex Program to the staff over a period of three months.
Matt Saunders reported:
“David’s services are good value for money for this business. In a measure of business efficiency improvement, we saw a better than 20% improvement in staff efficiency, and that resulted in us becoming more successful bidding larger more profitable contracts. The larger contracts were executed faster and more efficiently with better cooperation between departments and that pushed the company’s profitability up by 30%.”
