Measuring Your Results

I’ll share this thought with you one last time:

“Organizations of all sizes invest significant amounts of time, money, and energy on improving their processes with hopes of becoming more profitable. Sometimes this is based on a goal of becoming best-in-class but sometimes it is just to stay competitive with customers or in attracting talent. All too often though, the things that can have the most immediate impact on profitability (as well as the lives of everyone involved) are overlooked or completely written off because those things are considered to be intangible… What are those things? Those are the skills needed to build an organizational culture that produces world class results and make the best people in your respective industry beg to be part of your team! Those skills tie back to a word that’s frequently misused; leadership…”

Unfortunately, a large majority of the organizations in the world today will never capture all of the profitability they’re truly capable of generating for one painful reason: they just won’t take the necessary steps to track what they’re losing - or even the profit their best leaders capture when they do apply any of the steps we’ve covered here.

In my nearly twenty years with a large corporation, I was involved in countless continuous improvement events that started with a goal of achieving better results within a work cell or through an existing process. While we always began one of those events with a stated goal, the actual return on investment didn’t always match. And even when real improvements were made that increased productivity or lowered costs, old habits die hard - meaning that some of the most tenured team members involved didn’t always jump onboard and follow the new approach. Complicating that even more was what seemed like a constant push to chase a new rabbit nearly every time we turned a page on the calendar, confirming our ongoing reference about it being the most important quarter in the history of the world…

For years I’ve heard the saying that if you chase too many rabbits, you probably won’t catch any. That was far too often the case as way more of our time was sucked up in recording data or filling out reports than we had left over for doing the actual work. And that resulted in even more profitability being unnecessarily killed!

In addressing each of the things I’ve seen kill profitability in so many organizations, my goal hasn’t been for you to feel like you need to do everything at once. You and I both know that’s never feasible! That said, I believe every single thing we’ve covered in this process can have an immediate impact on its own AND I believe all of these things can have a compounding impact when we tie them together. I’m not about to pretend any of it will be easy but I know firsthand that it’s not hard… Possibly the most difficult part will be in changing the metrics you’re tracking.

I’m confident you’re already tracking a bunch of measurables, most of which are likely critical to your business. I’ll close this look at What’s Killing Your Profitability by challenging you to at least consider making a few tweaks to what you’re tracking - or in many cases, just how you’re tracking it - so you really can realize a long term return on the investments you make into providing these skills for your team members. I’m convinced that improving your profitability all boils down to leadership!