Value Creation means enhancing the worth of products and/or services being offered by a company to its customers. Businesses today concentrate on creating better value for their customers as well as for their shareholders (or stakeholders) who want to see their stakes appreciate. A value chain is a series of activities or processes which aims at creating and adding value to an article (product) at every step during the production process. The logic is simple; the more value a company creates, the more financial surplus (or profit) it generates. When more value is created, the same is passed on to the customers and thus, it helps in consolidating a competitive edge.
Here’s what Sandeep Aggarwal,a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, Internet visionary and philanthropist, has to say:
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Let me know in the comments section.
In this ongoing series #GreatMinds on my blog, I am shining a spotlight on the important ideas that some very successful people keep talking about in their public life.
Your customer value proposition (CVP) is what makes customers choose you instead of the competition – CVP is the foundation of your competitive advantage. Your customers compare your CVP with that of your competitors before they decide either in your favour or against you. Writing your CVP requires you to understand operations, marketing, as also strategy. You can offer value to your customers in several ways – monetary savings through offers and discounts, prompt deliveries, quicker attention to their complaints and suggestions, superior after-sales services, and providing certain specific conveniences like free home deliveries and others. You can discover many creative and innovative ways to bring value to your customers. Keep your CVP short and uncluttered. Be precise. Your customers have specific needs; your value proposition should offer targeted solutions. And finally, it is about your customer, not you. Your value proposition should discuss only what matters to your customers and not you.
Here’s what Micheal LeBoeuf,an American business author and management professor, has to say:
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Let me know in the comments section.
In this ongoing series #GreatMinds on my blog, I am shining a spotlight on the important ideas that some very successful people keep talking about in their public life.
By a start-up, we generally mean an enterprise or an entrepreneurial venture in the early stages of its development. Such ventures are promoted by a single or by two or more founders together who focus on exploiting a perceived market demand by developing a viable product, service, or platform.
Let me quote here a popular definition of a start-up from Eric Ries, an American author known for his book, “The Lean Startup”:
“A start-up is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”
Eric Ries
During the early stages, start-ups are usually self-funded by members of the founding team — though many entrepreneurs either resort to bootstrapping or secure funding through an investor or take out a loan from a bank or development financial institution (DFI) to help fund their venture.
A start-up is like prototyping a concept – it creates something new or novel.
The difference between a small business and a start-up!
Let us understand one important thing here, whereas small businesses may be happy staying small businesses forever – a start-up does not want to remain small all the time. Most start-up companies generally have a bubbling desire to scale up their businesses and grow – and more importantly, grow fast – deploying technology to do so.
A start-up means continuously identifying and solving problems – one after another.
A start-up journey is all about enthusiasm to push your limits and do a lot of experimentation. When you are managing your start-up – you have so many questions about your business model and its long-term sustainability. You want to know and understand about your customers, employees, suppliers, and others in your immediate and remote external environment.
As a start-up entrepreneur, you must always strive for that ideal or the best possible product/market fit. This will involve trying to identify your ideal customers, which products and services those ideal customers purchase, at what price points, and how frequently they make those purchases. Paying attention to the core metrics like average customer lifetime value (LTV), cost of customer acquisition (COCA), and average sales cycle length is also important to many start-up entrepreneurs.
A start-up company should also identify those unmet needs or gaps in the relevant market space that the entrepreneur can fill.
A start-up can also try to change the ways things are traditionally done. This will call for a resource-based approach on the part of the entrepreneur – where the entrepreneur develops a new product or service from the resources and competencies available to them within the enterprise and then educates the customers to try these new offerings. Customer education coupled with adequate promotion and advertising will form an integral part of this strategy.
Let us be very clear about one thing – a start-up refers to starting from scratch. If you have already nailed your product-market fit and started making some money (revenue) – then you are not a start-up. A start-up is any business venture that is starting from scratch (earning zero revenue) and trying to build something of value.
A start-up is a group of people who bring about disruptive changes in the world.
Businesses can be considered to be in the start-up phase, “from zero revenue until they have found the best product-market fit, a valid business model, and replicable revenue generation strategies. Once those criteria are met, the business is no longer a start-up and instead moves to the scaling phase.”
What are some traits associated with start-ups?
Start-up implies a phase of the company where success is not yet determined. A team defines what a start-up is. A start-up is the largest group of rebels, rule-breakers, and unconventional thinkers that you can find, convince and inspire to create breakthrough change in the world. They are crazy. They view the world from a different angle and are not afraid to fail.
The focus of any start-up is on continuously testing, iterating, and learning.
A start-up is also characterized as a mix of emotions – start-up embodies these intense emotions of fear, nervousness, anxiety, and uncertainty. It is that peculiar feeling in your stomach that aches before you ride a rollercoaster or the nerves that flood your body before meeting someone new on a date!
A start-up is lean and adaptive. A start-up is a company that may not always have so many employees – it is an organization where individuals are working together towards a common goal, and that goal is usually highly innovative. They are heavily defined by their actions and execution, not just their ideas. It is mostly young, ambitious with a growing number of people with momentum around an idea or innovation.
In conclusion, I’d like to add that one should not mistake a start-up to be any company with a ping pong table, cool office decor, employee outings, loose regulations, and/or casual behaviour. A start-up is about actionable innovations around ideas!
In my upcoming post next week, I will be elaborating about the common problems that start-ups face like raising capital, failure of business model, poor human resource management and more… Obviously, I will also write about strategies an entrepreneur can deploy to mitigate such situations.
STAY TUNED FOR NEXT WEEK’S POST!
REFERENCES:
McGowan, Emma. “What Is a Startup Company, Anyway?” Startups.Com, 1 Mar. 2018, www.startups.com/library/expert-advice/what-is-a-startup-company.
Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business, 2011.
What are the types of resources you need to round up for your venture?
You are an entrepreneur managing a start-up or an organisation to navigate it in the direction of sustained profitability and growth. To accomplish the mission of your organization – you will require various physical, financial, human, informational, and other types of resources. Resource Mobilization in a broader sense will mean garnering various types of supports from friends, family, stakeholders in business, your own employees, support infrastructure as also identifying, locating, and procuring certain scarce resources that are essential for your business. Resources can include many things including but not limited to money alone.
The Basic need: Physical Resources
Physical resources may include land, buildings, plant, machinery & equipments, your workspace, working telephone lines, information systems, furniture items, and other material inventories. Mobilizing physical resources may involve lot of funds and therefore you must exercise caution before committing funds for this section. Many new entrepreneurs are known to have initiated their business ventures from their home, a cart or a stall, garage or a very small place initially.
True Value Creators: Human Resources
Human resources are the most important category of resources because all other resources are managed by people alone! Recruiting, selecting, and appointing competent manpower for your organization is therefore an extremely important resource mobilization activity. As an entrepreneur, you have to meticulously work to create an effective organizational structure. You must create a top layer of strategic managers, a middle management layer of tactical managers, and finally a lower management layer of operational executives, supervisors, and frontline workers. Apart from this, you also must identify a suitable professionals who can work as advisors and experts (like chartered accountants, legal experts, and other functional consultants) for your business.
Staying Updated: Informational Resources
Mobilizing and managing necessary information is also very important for any modern business enterprise. It may include knowledge and information related to technical know-how, manufacturing processes, plant layouts, design inputs and details relating to technology transfer and absorption. Various Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and several standardized formats for a host of organizational functions may also fall in this category.
The Inescapable: Financial Resources
Funding is the most important aspect for any start-up or business. An entrepreneur can raise funds from his/her parents, spouse, other family members, relatives, friends, and associates including his/her major suppliers and other stakeholders in business. These are the persons who can directly contribute to the equity share capital of the firm/company and/or provide unsecured loans (quasi equity) to help the entrepreneur in his/her efforts to build the required level of equity.
Having raised necessary equity, the entrepreneur can always approach a development financial institution (DFI) or some bank or term lending institution for raising necessary term loan for financing the fixed assets.
For supporting the normal day to day operations of business, the entrepreneur can always approach any commercial bank and negotiate a suitable cash credit limit (working capital) for financing of the current assets.
As an entrepreneur – you can also approach several other resources to meet your funding needs – such sources include private investors, private equity firms, venture capital funding, angel investors, and grants and subsidies from the Government. You can always get details about these sources of funding from the internet and other places. It is however important that you review your specific circumstances before you decide on any of these options.
There are differrent methods to acquire financial resources
Venture funding is not suitable for all entrepreneurs. Venture capitalists are looking for high technology proposals with high-growth potential in sectors like information technology, communications, and biotechnology. Venture capitalists take an equity position in the company to help it carry out a promising but higher risk project. This involves giving up some ownership or equity in your business to an external party.
Angels are high net worth individuals or senior executives who invest directly in small firms owned by others. They are often specialists in their own field who not only contribute their experience and network of contacts but also their technical and/or management knowledge. In turn for risking their money, they reserve the right to supervise the company’s management practices. In concrete terms, this often involves a seat on the board of directors and an assurance of transparency. Angels tend to keep a low profile.
You may also take benefit of various grants and subsidies provided to entrepreneurs by the Government. The Government announces such grants and subsidies to start-ups and businesses from time to time. The purpose of these grants and subsidies is to help you meet expenses towards research and development, marketing, salaries, equipment, and productivity improvement. A grant is a sum of money conditionally given to your business that you do not have to repay. However, you are bound legally to use it under the terms of the grant, or otherwise you may be asked to repay it.
The Replenishment: Educational Resources
The greatest thing that an entrepreneur can do when establishing a new business is to gain as much education as possible. By understanding his/her competition and gaining an in-depth knowledge of his/her industry, he/she will be better prepared to make smarter decisions regarding the direction of his/her firm. Educational resources can be found through professional trade associations, local chambers of commerce, and other professional forums.
Connecting with Stakeholders: Relational Resources
These consist of aspects like customer relationships, supplier relationships, trademarks and trade names, which have value only by virtue of customer relationships, licenses, and franchises. The value of the relationships a business maintains with its customers and suppliers is also referred as goodwill, but often poorly booked in corporate accounts, because of accounting rules. HIPOs, as they are called, high potential employees are the ones who have exceptional potential, ability, and aspiration for successive leadership positions.
Not only customers, but supplier relations are also important.
How does one begin to accomplish this?
As a smart entrepreneur – you must work out a comprehensive plan/strategy for resources mobilization. You must ensure that all necessary inputs for operations are available at the workplace as and when you require these.
Apart from the major plant, machinery and equipment items, other inputs like raw materials, packaging materials, maintenance materials, various tools and measuring instruments and a host of informational inputs like drawings, blueprints, standard operating procedures, and others will be necessary.
All such inputs must be procured in right quantity, right quality, at the right place, and at right time. It is also necessary that we make right use of acquired resources thus ensuring optimum utilization of the same.
Proper supplier data base should be created, and suppliers should be evaluated based on pre-determined criteria (decided based on the consensus reached in a multi-disciplinary meeting of executives). This will ensure that we procure our production inputs from reputed, resourceful, and tested suppliers with whom we have established relationships.
Notwithstanding the fact that we are dealing with known suppliers, we must obtain competitive bids from interested suppliers and base our purchase decision on a pre-determined decision matrix. This will make sure that we are not paying unreasonable prices to the selected suppliers.
We should also do hard negotiation with suppliers to get reasonable (and at times favourable) terms on obtaining suitable warrantees, guarantees, free spares, after sales service, and/or several other facilities which may be specific to our case.
Before I sign off — things you must remember!
Resource mobilization efforts should align with your organizational mission, objectives, and strategic plan.
Resource mobilization is also about the needs of your (prospective) funder, and your clients.
Resource mobilization is often wrongly considered as fundraising. In fact, fundraising is a component of the resource mobilization.
Your strategic plan is the anchor of your resource mobilization strategy – in which your organization’s programs, structure and systems, as well as financials are reviewed, and new business opportunities are identified.
Successful resource mobilization requires a lot of work and takes a lot of time.
If your organization needs additional revenue one year from now, start today!
Your organizational performance today impacts your ability to generate resources tomorrow.
You must establish and maintain organizational credibility and reputation.
References:
H, Mayuri. “Mobilising Resources for Startups: Types, Problems and Solution | Entrepreneurship | Business.” Essays, Research Papers and Articles on Business Management, 4 Sept. 2018, www.businessmanagementideas.com/startups/mobilising-resources-for-startups-types-problems-and-solution-entrepreneurship-business/18188.
Seltzer, Judith B. “What Is Resource Mobilization and Why Is It so Important?” HC3, 20 Oct. 2014, www.healthcommcapacity.org/resource-mobilization-important.
The concept of competence as a source of competitive advantage has originated in studies of diversified firms. Managers started to conceive of the company as a collection of competencies rather than as a portfolio of business units. In this way, managers were able to identify new business opportunities and find new ways to deploy the company’s intellectual assets. Managers eventually came to realize that the corporation could also draw on the competencies of its supply-chain partners. During the last decade, managers have extended the search for competencies even further; they now draw on a broad network of suppliers and distributors. Over time, then, the unit of strategic analysis has moved from the single company to a family of businesses, and finally to what people call the “extended enterprise,” which consists of a central firm supported by a constellation of suppliers. But the recognition that consumers are a source of competence forces managers to cast an even wider net: competence now is a function of the collective knowledge available to the whole system—an enhanced network of traditional suppliers, manufacturers, partners, investors, and customers.
Here’s what Brian Tracy,a Canadian-American motivational public speaker, has to say:
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Let me know in the comments section.
In this ongoing series #GreatMinds on my blog, I am shining a spotlight on the important ideas that some very successful people keep talking about in their public life.
I feel proud in telling all my readers that I am an ardent fan of Ratan Tata. I am now in my early seventies enjoying my third inning as a freelance advisor, blogger, business consultant, educator, and mentor. During all my classroom sessions with undergraduate and postgraduate students of management, strategy, and entrepreneurship as also during my professional interactions with young corporate executives and aspiring entrepreneurs – I have always been quoting examples of Tata Group and Ratan Tata. They are good exemplars to illustrate my lessons on best business and management practices. The Tatas have always adhered to excellent business ethics and corporate governance practices, corporate social responsibility. They are not only good at dealing with all stakeholders with earnest and fairness but also at contributing to environmental sustainability, and improving the quality of life of people.
“Once, Nano — one of his pet projects, was mired in controversy about land acquisition for the factory. After the protest of farmers in Singur, West Bengal, his company had to pull out of the state. But after all these happenings, he kept his promise to run this project. Tata’s project was shifted to Gujarat and delivered its promise to build the cheapest car.
A real-life example that demonstrates how serious he has been about keeping his promises.
Today – through this blog post – I am trying to bring about certain business learnings from the business experience of Ratan Tata. There is so much information available about Ratan Sir on the internet and other sources that it was difficult for me to decide as to what I should pick up for this post. I hope what I have finally chosen to include in this post benefits and motivates you.
A few lessons that are worth emulating:
It is great to be a Morning Person:
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise – Going to bed early, say before 10 PM and starting your day early next morning (say 5 AM) helps you better deal with negativity. It enhances your chances of success and makes you more persistent, cooperative, agreeable, conscientious, and proactive. Ratan Tata always believed in being a morning person – he used to convene his important business meetings at 6 AM in the morning to get the best results from these meetings.
Building an Atmosphere of Trust:
According to Ratan Tata – Trust is the psychological bond between you and your customers, employees, and stakeholders. Without trust, you risk becoming a superficial entrepreneur. It is therefore essential that you develop an environment of love, concern, and trust among all members of your enterprise – ensuring that you understand the aspirations and expectations of all your stakeholders and fulfil them.
Building Great Employee Relationships:
You must have a strong connection and nurture excellent relationships with your employees. Ratan Tata followed this religiously. According to him, you must inspire and motivate your employees to get the job done effectively and efficiently. You should also, through your leadership, strive to ensure that employees and management should adhere to the company vision and values.
Humility is a great Leadership Trait:
Ratan Tata has remained a humble man throughout his career. Staying humble made him a great leader and he always put himself grounded. As a result, he could easily serve his organization and its employees according to their interests. This is a great lesson for our current generation of organizational leaders and corporate managers – something worth emulating.
Always having a Positive Attitude:
As an entrepreneur or corporate executive – you must always carry a positive attitude. Ratan Tata always has a positive attitude, and he puts a smile on his face in every situation. He always possesses a positive outlook towards any difficult situation. He always tries to be a doer, not a criticizer.
Risk-taking is important for Entrepreneurs:
Ratan Tata always believes in taking the risk. He thinks that life is not lived unless one takes chances and learns how to survive the odds of new challenges. Once he said, “I don’t believe in making the right decisions. I take decisions and make them right.”
Need for Collaborating and Working together:
Ratan Tata has suggested that Indian companies need to focus more on collaboration in various areas to propel the country instead of focusing only on individual achievements. He says – “If you want to go fast, walk alone but if you want to go far, walk together.” No doubt – that is great business learning.
Learning from the Life Experiences of Others:
The best way to keep your motivational levels rising is by educating yourself from the life experiences of others. Other people’s struggle and their zeal to fight all odds to reach a pinnacle position in real life can be a great deal of inspirational dosage if you too want to attain your goals in life. Great learning indeed – try to learn from your own mistakes and failures as also from the experience of others.
Being A Man of Values:
Ratan Tata believes that a company should be run on principles, not on personalities. He and his company had some core values which they followed all through their journey. He is also well known for promoting financial transparency and intense vetting for grants for projects which help needy people. Furthermore, public safety and welfare are some of their core values which they always followed. This leadership quality has made them one of the most trusted groups worldwide.
Tata Group: A few laurels it has earned
“The Tata Group is one of India’s most respected business houses founded on ethical values originated by the founding father Jamsethji Nusserwanji Tata. Its five core values are integrity, understanding, excellence, unity, and responsibility. Tata Group’s focus is on social responsibility and ethical business practices. It is committed to giving back to society and improving the quality of life of people and contributing to environmental sustainability. It has a well-established code of conduct and a business excellence model.
Since its inception, the Tata Group had sought to function with ethics, integrity, social consciousness, and fairness. According to Ratan Tata, these values were an integral part of the group. This was intended to serve as a guide to each employee on the values, ethics and business principles expected of him or her in personal and professional conduct.
Tata Power has been named as one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies for 2016 by the Ethisphere Institute, USA, for the third successive year. Tata Power constantly works towards fostering an ethical environment through senior leadership involvement, training, and communication.
In 2017, Tata Steel had been recognized by Ethisphere Institute, a global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practice. The steel giant has received the coveted recognition for the fifth time.”
Your first business may not give you the success you have been dreaming of. Many entrepreneurs feel that their first idea will give them immediate success. However, this first idea may be naive or overplanned. It is the small failures in your entrepreneurial journey that bring clarity of thought. If you give up on your first attempt, you will not be able to stomach the twists and turns that a business can bring. Name any big businessman; I can assure you that they have been a serial entrepreneur. Their first business was not their final one!
Here’s what Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw,an Indian billionaire entrepreneur and the chairperson of Biocon, has to say:
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Let me know in the comments section.
In this ongoing series #GreatMinds on my blog, I am shining a spotlight on the important ideas that some very successful people keep talking about in their public life.
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
~ Warren G. Bennis
Business practices are centuries old – when there were small businesses with local customer groups and there was not much socio-economic pressure. With rapid industrialization in developing and developed countries, business over the years has become large/larger in size and complex in nature and character.
A modern business enterprise is multi-product and multi-location (and multi-national) and serving to a wide variety of customers across the globe. Businesses and the business environment have been changing at a fast speed – both the changes and the speed of change being very important. As such, the impact of the socio-economic state and structure of the region (and the rest of the world) has become critical in business.
Objectives of A Modern Visionary Organization
Serving customers more effectively and efficiently as compared to the competition (customer-centric approach).
Keeping products and services appropriate to changing times and conforming to customers’ needs and wants.
Running a business with a sense of earnestness and competition.
Keeping the organization worthy to work for and to be associated with. Making your enterprise a great place to work.
Earning profits and generating wealth through value addition and surplus generation.
Adhering to ethical business practices, good corporate governance, and Corporate Social Responsibility norms.
Earning respect from the people and the community
The above contextual shift in the management of businesses has necessitated the requirement of a newer breed of business managers and organizational leaders who can think globally and compete strategically. Such organizational leaders and executives with their proven competence can certainly drive performance across domains, industries, and borders.
A modern business leader or corporate manager as described above must carry a compelling vision of the future of the organization and must be able to inspire, motivate, and engage others to join him in holding this vision together. Such a visionary leader will be able to energise other members of his team in sharing the vision and working in collaboration with all others to turn that vision into reality.
Great Leaders must have two things: a vision of the world that does not yet exist and the ability to communicate that vision clearly.
~Simon Sinek
A Visionary Manager as profiled above will further be able to formulate powerful strategies to outshine in today’s dynamic and volatile markets, respond appropriately to changing socio-economic trends and disruptive innovation practices prevalent in the industry, manage and coordinate various distributed assets, processes, partners, and collaborators, and most importantly manage all strategic alliances, outsourcing contracts, forward and backward integrative linkages with third parties.
Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion.
~Jack Welch
Important attributes & traits of visionary leaders:
They exhibit a balanced expression of spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical dimensions. They solve day to day problems with a broader vision of the organization always at top of their mind.
They have a demonstrated ability to lead the team; make the best use of team synergy and cohesiveness.
They are effective communicators and possess the art of listening. Good senior executives generally listen much more than what they speak.
They possess excellent conceptual, human, negotiation, and persuasion skills.
They demonstrate their knowledge and experience during business interactions and meetings.
They possess the ability to organize themselves, the department, and the enterprise.
They practice effective time management and are clear about the urgent–important syndrome. They are punctual and love others being punctual.
They are confident in their ability, experience, and decisions. They always care for their priorities and never procrastinate.
They create an atmosphere of reliability and trust.
They are masters in effective delegation.
They love and respect their subordinates and team members.
They possess the necessary self-confidence meaning that nothing comes as a surprise to them.
They make valuable decisions and can substantiate how they were made that way.
They possess excellent core values and a clear vision.
They engage in empowering relationships.
They practice creativity and innovation.
Their perspective is broad, and they possess the ability to deal with a global network of human beings – in other words dealing with a multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional and cross-cultural workforce with a diversity of thoughts.
They demonstrate effectiveness and efficiency in their action, brevity in expression, curtsey in behaviour, firmness in decisions, and tact in handling delicate and sensitive situations.
“Leaders think and talk about the solutions. Followers think and talk about the problems.”
Working Capital (WC) refers to the cash a business requires for meeting its day-to-day operational expenses like financing the conversion of raw materials into finished goods, salaries, wages, payment of bills, and others. WC is a must for every business. A business cannot survive and run without adequate working capital. WC is the lifeblood of every business organization. Business firms cannot make progress without adequate working capital. Inadequacy of WC will mean a shortage of raw materials and other inputs necessary for production, whereas excess working capital extra cost in terms of interest and other charges to the lending bank. It is therefore imperative for every entrepreneur and/or CEO to undertake effective WC management in his/her organization.
Here’s a quote that explains this well:
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Let me know in the comments section.
In this ongoing series #GreatMinds on my blog, I am shining a spotlight on the important ideas that some very successful people keep talking about in their public life.
As an entrepreneur or business owner, you must adhere to the best business management and operational practices so that you make judicious use of all available physical, financial, human, and informational resources to create products and/or services which satisfy needs and wants of your targeted customers.
To ensure that the above idea turns into a reality, you need to create a proper conversion house or manufacturing/operating facility (like a factory or some other kind of workstation) where the actual conversion of inputs into marketable outputs will take place.
You must also make sure that you are creating value from your operations and delivering the created value to all your stakeholders – most importantly to customers, employees, and shareholders.
The above plan will be of no use unless you succeed in mobilising excellent manpower and galvanize them into an effective team. You should also build world class business processes and systems. Building a compelling vision for your organization, and setting goals and objectives matching to your vision will set forth the strategic intent of your organization.
To get the best performance from your team in terms of enhanced production, productivity, and profits, I suggest that you implement the following suggestions:
Follow Good Management Practices:
While as a leader/manager you must practice all managerial functions like planning, organising, leading, motivating, communicating, coordinating, and controlling – you must all the time focus upon the crucial relationship between planning and control.
Planning and control are known as Siamese twins of management (I suggest that you read about this concept from the internet). There is a very close link between planning and controlling. A modern enterprise continuously cycles back and forth between planning and controlling. To start with, the manager makes plans and then uses the control system to monitor progress towards the fulfilment of these plans.
The above practice ensures that you always remain on track and avoid any kind of sub-optimal performance in your operations.
If you are implementing a project, the best practices you develop help you avoiding serious cost escalations and timeline slippages.
Build values in your team:
Apart from identifying and positioning best people in the organizational team – you must ensure that you develop important personal and professional values in your teammates – like honesty, integrity, compassion, cooperation, and collaboration.
Your team members must learn to work in multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural environments and should embrace diversity.
They should be active listeners – and not selective listeners.
Practice assertion and affection together:
Do exercise your managerial authority.
Assert, emphasize, and push your team hard towards challenging goals and targets – but ensuring that you extend adequate consideration and genuine love for each member of your team.
Talk to your team members frequently, understand their personal and professional problems and try to solve these to the extent you can, genuinely address to their apprehensions, anxieties, and fears. While you may talk about their achievements before everybody; talk to them about their mistakes and suggest to them corrective measures only in a private meeting with them (a coffee often does wonders during such a meeting).
Go for Participative Goal Setting:
As far as possible, involve your team members in the process of setting goals for them. I strongly believe that participative goal setting enhances employee engagement. Once members of the team feel that they were involved in the process of decision-making and setting targets — they work on the project wholeheartedly as if they were working on their own venture. Involving employee in goal-setting process also boosts thier motivation up.
Participative goal-setting not only helps team-members to commit to the task completion but also builds their confidence.
Develop a Learning Orientation:
Encourage your team members to continuously follow the path of learning and growth. Ensure that they are provided with necessary support infrastructure to further this objective. Establishing well equipped libraries and reading rooms, arranging masterclasses and expert talks, and presence of in-house counsellors, and mentors can be of great help in furthering this objective.
We should encourage our team members to read good books and biographies to learn from others’ experience.
They may also be encouraged to ask questions and/or interview those persons whose journey had impressed them.
Discipline and Consistency are very important:
Discipline is consistency of action. It is the discipline that keeps us growing – that is the law of consistency. Together, consistency and discipline are the two keys to success in any area of life. You may achieve some goals without them, but when you are chasing bigger goals, you cannot get far without discipline and consistency. Discipline and consistency go hand in hand.
Every member of the team must be consistent and disciplined so that he/she is able to align their contribution to the eventual goals of the enterprise.
Stick On – Do not Quit:
We all have heard the famous proverb – winners never quit, and quitters never win. Train your people to keep struggling, keep trying relentlessly, to never surrender, and to never give up. Businesses will always have ups and downs — therefore, it is important that we maintain an all-time high morale in all our team members so that they are always ready to face any situation or temporary hurdles.
Remember that miracles happen only to those who never give up.
