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What does it feel like to be the best of the best?  At the moment of victory, it feels great.  What does it take to get there?  It takes hours and hours of practicing the basics, until they become second nature.  A business person that chooses to compete at the top of their market will work hard.  That hard work is the cost of membership into the top tier of your market and will bring rewards.

Competing at the top requires more than simply pumping additional money into an organization.  A solid base like the “Peerless Pyramid” is quite simply the starting point, and while solid organization will not guarantee business success, a poorly organized structure will guarantee business failure.  Performing at the top of your market requires going beyond a solid structure- it requires binding that structure together with solid business processes.

All businesses have processes.  Processes, like problems, must be recognized and acknowledged before they can be successfully dealt with.  My last article “Be the Best III” took a close look at the “flawless implementation” of each process by comparing processes to a football team’s plays.  The difference between a top team and the bottom team is not the plays but how the plays are executed.  During a football play, every member of the team has an assigned duty and reaching the goal for that play depends on the ability of each team member to execute their part in the play. 

With your business team, each member must do their part to achieve the objective of the process.  With a play in football the results are immediately known by all of the team members; their feedback comes from either yardage gained or lost.  These easily identifiable and measurable results provide critical feedback to each team member, resulting in a motivational part of the process, i.e. play.  The goal for you as the team leader is to determine not only what needs to be measured but how to display the results. This provides the critical feedback for each team member. 

In business, dollars are the best measurement tool.  A process that can be measured by either increasing income or reducing expenses often provides the best feedback.  In retail, the sales process produces an increase in income by converting inventory back into cash.  The salesperson gets immediate feedback and is motivated to make additional sales. The assumption is that what they are selling meets the buy low, sell high and keep the difference formula.  It is vital that each team member contributes accurately to the process, ensuring that the company makes money on each sale. 

The sales process in this case involves more than the salesperson, which illustrates the need to identify everyone that contributes to the process and develop measurement tools that provide the needed feedback.  Motivating team members using monetary measurement tools is effective if they can get timely feedback.  In our retail sales example, basing a bonus or commission on not only dollar amount of sales but also profitability would motivate the sales person to sell at a profit.  They will need to get not only immediate feedback on dollars sold but profitability on each sale.  The problem for you as a team leader is to develop tools that provide the salesperson with this kind of measurable information, i.e., sales profitability. 

The rest of the team also needs feedback from this process to make sure they are contributing properly to the overall process.  The inventory management accountant needs to understand that calculating and adding the proper margin to each product results in success for the whole team.  It would be motivational for this accountant to also share in a piece of the action in the form of a bonus.  They would also need tools that accurately measure results, giving them the feedback and an incentive to price properly. 

This is a simple example illustrating the need for measuring results.  Up to this point we have discussed six of the seven steps in the implementation of processes that separate profitable companies from the unprofitable.  Moving through these steps will reveal the who, what, when and were of your company’s processes.  This gives you as the leader a clear understanding of the entire process and enables you to establish goals for each step.  Process goals make the step of developing measurable and meaningful results easier.  The difference between being at the top or at the bottom of your market is the flawless implementation and execution your business process.  Determining how to incrementally measure results moves us on to continuous improvement, the final step in process implementation.  Practice makes perfect!

Process Implementation Steps:

1. Recognize the Process
2. Formalize the Process
3. Simplify the Process
4. Repeat the Process
5. Flawless implementation
6. Measurable results
7. Continuous improvement

Download larger version of the Peerless Pyramid

Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions.
Write David W. Weatherholt at david@bnewsviews.com

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