Continued from Part 1

Improve feedback mechanisms. Sometimes these need work, occasionally they’re non-existent, and they can be applied on a personal level or on a project level.

This can be difficult, many people are not naturally comfortable or good at giving negative feedback (I absolutely hate it), so training or learning around how to do this effectively is recommended. Unless someone is told where and why they went wrong, expecting them not to make the same mistake again is foolish. 

When things go wrong, especially in firms where there is a high level of throughput, it can be hard to step back and analyse why and feed this back to the team or individual involved. Arrange post-mortems wherever possible; the learnings from a job that hasn’t gone to plan or one which has required a different approach need to be digested and fed back to the individuals responsible, and ideally to the entire team, so that everyone learns and grows as a unit.

Creating more robust processes. These should be created directly from the learnings of your post-mortems. Everything which has caused a failure, where possible, should have a process created around it to avoid the same thing happening again in the future. What you want to end up with, in an ideal world, is a system where mistakes are almost impossible to make, due to the set of checks and processes that surround a task. This can be as simple as check lists or accountability structures so that those who are less detail focused don’t miss things or peer reviews to help fast movers execute and detail people refine.

This in turn leads us to improve onboarding. Even big firms mess this up, smaller ones often ignore it completely – it’s hard to create processes when you’re just focused on doing the work.

Set expectations from day one. Tell people how you work, what matters and what doesn’t. Ensure that detail people know exactly when speed matters, and that fast movers know exactly when accuracy is non negotiable. If you don’t give a clear direction your staff will default to their personality type, whether it suits your business or not.

Bad onboarding is guaranteeing future headaches, and as time goes by it gets exponentially more difficult to bring up and correct bad behaviours.

More open management – this operates on a spectrum. I’ve usually worked in places where there is very little information on the actual mechanics of the business, the first time I saw what was actually going on it was eye opening. There is a limit, obviously, but generally the more information you give your staff the better they’ll be placed to make decisions. If they know what jobs are of strategic importance they’ll know how to prioritise. If they understand the commercial viability of different jobs they won’t agree to things that are bad for the business.

Give staff a window into the financials (selectively). Start by sharing margin data on projects in team meetings so that they can understand which jobs matter commercially and which don’t. Run quarterly meetings to update everyone on the state of the business and the key priorities for the next quarter, it’ll lead to better decision making and make them feel more engaged.

If any of this sounds familiar and you’d like to brainstorm solutions, drop me a line. nathan@nbstrategy.co.uk

 nathan@nbstrategy.co.uk.