Clear Expectations Remove Excuses & Increase Profit

If we wanna stop leaving all that profit on the table, we’ve got to take action. The hard part though, as I just shared, often boils down to what we can or cannot dedicate our resources to - or at least that’s what I hear from folks in leadership roles quite frequently. If we only had money in our budget for XYZ, then our people and our processes would be more productive… 

When we get right down to it, all that additional downtime we looked at before that stems from confusion has very little to do with having better equipment or more pay and a whole lot to do with having a clear understanding of what’s expected. One of the first rules I learned as a carpenter, one that’s certainly helped improve profitability for countless construction companies over the years, was “measure twice, cut once.” I’ll challenge you to think of the simplicity tied to that statement… It’s all about behavior and requires no additional expensive equipment! And it’s really a way to remove confusion from the building process.

As leaders, “measuring twice and cutting once” is a matter of making sure we’ve set clear expectations for our team and delivered the message in a way that they understand exactly what needs to be accomplished. Removing confusion does quite a bit to eliminate additional downtime but it also helps to minimize the profitability that’s killed when errors are made!

In an article I found on LinkedIn called The 10 Best Ways Managers Can Impact Profitability Through People, Nicki Rankin opened by detailing the pressures often felt by those of us in leadership roles by saying:

Managers are tasked with productivity and numbers for their department or division.  This requires figuring out how to get maximum performance from your employees to impact company bottom line results.  On the other hand, we want people to be happy.  Can you have both?  The answer is a resounding “Yes!”

Rankin went on to share this describing how much having clear expectations matters in achieving profitability through the teams we lead:

Employees need to know what’s expected of them, both what they need to accomplish and how to behave.  Meeting with new employees to go over expectations and having regular staff meetings can help you accomplish this and will allow you and the team hold everyone accountable.  Tie them into company strategy and core values.  Don’t forget to tell them you expect honest feedback and for them to constructively disagree with you when necessary.

As we looked at employee engagement, I shared how I’ve always been far less interested in making people happy than I’ve been in giving them a reason to buy into a purpose. Since I’ve seen so many people use those ideas synonymously, I’ll fight the urge to go down that rabbit hole here and just ask you to consider whether or not you’ve ever been actively engaged (or even happy for that matter) when you were given a vague task with almost no understanding of what you would need to do to accomplish it…

If you’re anything like me, you not only weren’t engaged or happy, you were probably pretty frustrated! And I'd also guess your performance was far less productive (or profitable) than it would have been had you been provided with all the information necessary to successfully complete the task… When we put our team members in a situation like that, the results we get are likely packed full of excuses for subpar performance. In reality, clear expectations for what we need them to achieve and how they should go about doing it nearly always removes those excuses and increases our chances of being profitable in the process! With that in mind, we need to consider the difference between meeting expectations and exceeding expectations then we can nail down a few simple steps for making this part of everything we do as we lead our teams.