Plan Ahead and Succeed

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It is the time to set next year’s goals and expectations. You should not wait until the first of the year arrives and attempt to set the plan and goals for new year. We all have completed our pro forma for next year and estimated our EBITs, but have we created our strategic plans that will yield double digit growth? Estimating the financials for the upcoming year will not suffice and allow success. Below is a short list of initiatives that we should look at for the upcoming year.

1. Set your goals for cost of poor quality. Understand how you are going to measure it. Are you going to include the rework, the loss of productivity due to poor quality, customer returns and investigation costs, and repair costs? Whatever you measure in the upcoming year, assure that you show a reduction and have projects with milestones established to begin in January. Do not set yourself up for the next year by having a bad first quarter and chasing the year’s goals to recover those costs. Make your goal a reflection of projects you will manage and not a wish list. Spell out the plan’s expectations month by month with start dates, cost realization dates, project completion dates, and determine who the leader is for each project. Set your report out dates for the next year and schedule the team’s calendars to assure that teams know when they are going to review projects with the executive team.

2. Create a process improvement team and set expectations. You should know where your efficiency losses are and establish which ones you are going to tackle and the order and timeframe for those projects. Set a reasonable amount of tasks. Many businesses will create a wish list that is too large for the staffing. Scheduling too many tasks for your workforce can only lead to frustration, fractured efforts, and a disengaged workforce. Strategically assign those tasks, determine reasonable expectations, and set a detailed review schedule for the plan’s events on a regular basis. Become involved as a leader because your workforce will prioritize their efforts by the attention and involvement your leadership displays in the upcoming year.

3. Assure that you have an active environmental health and safety plan to improve the safety and ergonomics of your operation. Remember, people want to be treated fairly and they will engage more if you are concerned for their well-being. Strive to improve the ergonomics in the workplace. Recordable and lost time injuries are bad for a business’s reputation and finances, but they also can disengage a workforce quickly. Care about your employees and make it a passion to evolve the workplace to a safer environment. Embrace their concerns as you would your family members. They are your livelihood. If you do not have a methodology to collect the employee’s risks, hold a “stand-down” for four hours to collect ideas from employees. Take those ideas, Pareto them by risk to employees and aggressively burn them down. Assure the plan attacks these on a monthly basis. Form subcommittees to address these ideas. Everyone in the organization can take ownership of a task as safety is everyone’s job.

4. Train your employees early and on a repetitive regular schedule. You should have already met with your employees and determined their training needs. Now you must schedule a plan to deliver on those internal and external needs. Do not leave this as a human resource task. It is a leadership responsibility that our reports are enriching themselves each year. You may want to look at your most unproductive weeks in the previous years and declare them training weeks. This allows you to write off the week from deliveries and profit based on poor historical performance. Typically, the first week of the year, the week of July 4th and Labor Day week are poor performers as the previous quarter has just ended and people include additional vacation days to long weekends. Put training into this week and declare the week as a non-production week. Planning this activity allows customer commits to be maintained by overproduction in prior weeks and planned delivery commits pushed out of these weeks where possible.

5. Create production start plans that are visual and observable to all employees. Plan on Gemba walks daily and review these start plans. These plans are critical to success. If you start on time, you will finish on time. Don’t leave the plan’s execution to the planners and materials department to manage. All directly involved employees must understand the plan, discuss it daily at Gemba walks, and assure that procurement, operations, quality, and the materials department understands when the production starts for every job. This is critical for mixed model production. This plan is should not be in a notebook but must be displayed on some visual system that all employees can monitor. The more visuals you have in your company, the more self-managed it becomes.

Remember that strategic planning will assure 2016 will be better than 2015. Don’t wait until the year begins to invoke the plan as you will have an overly burden the last two quarters of the year. If you have not already shared your vision and plan with the entire organization, do it early in the year

Understanding Leadership’s Drive

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Building the business on a path to success is sometimes difficult if you do not understand the basics and fundamentals of desirable characteristics. A leader must understand what it takes to earn the trust of the organization and what is necessary to possess in your inner self to be successful. A leader must be ambitious and adaptable to ever-changing business conditions. Your ambition cannot wear on your self-control and you must keep emotions in check during stressful times. Leaders must use common sense and cross check their actions with their ethics and values at all times. There are always times when your business will stretch your patience because your ambition to be successful will take control. Keep emotions in check and realize if this was easy, anyone could do it. You are a leader because you are competitive and temporary setbacks are part of any business. Surely you want your business to run dull, boring and without drama but usually that in not the case. You must use your resourcefulness to create a team spirit to resolve problems and setbacks and continue to possess the integrity to make correct decisions. Have faith in yourself and organization to be successful and be sincere in all communications with your team. A successful leader is patient with situations and understands that people will model his/her behavior. Every decision you make must be done with confidence, sincerity and honesty. Lead with passion and not emotions.

Understand them, Embrace,them and Lead Them to Success

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Effective leadership is one where the leader makes every attempt to understand people’s paradigms. If a leader’s task is too assure that people accept their vision, then they must understand all the different perspectives that people have within them. People’s paradigms are based on their experiences and backgrounds and many may not be something a leader has lived. Without the communication with team members on their lives and history, a leader cannot begin to understand their paradigm. People love to tell you who they are and what there life entails. Embrace them, listen, and mentally walk in their shoes. After you take their paradigm into you inner self you can then develop a workplace that they fit into and then accept your vision. Once the vision is accepted and agreed, the strategic plan becomes effective. You will be aware of your employee’s strengths and weaknesses and then you can make their weaknesses into strengths and harvest their strengths. Once your employees realize how capable they are, their performance will become heighten and your business will grow exponentially. For years corporate America has shunned relationships with employees and we have distanced them from the corporate management. Other culture’s have been successful at this concept and have evolved beyond our performance. Reach out, embrace and understand employees and you will develop a self-empowered, self-directed workforce that over achieves.