Defensiveness Costs Your Company Profits
Are you trying to improve your performance?
(Pause for a few seconds and answer the question in your head.)
What did you think about?
When you ask a leader if he or she is trying to improve their performance, the answer is nearly always a quick “yes.”
However, when I ask what they are trying to improve I usually hear about the weaknesses of a specific part of a team, a department or a division within their enterprise.
When I clarify the question, explaining that I am asking about their professional performance, the answer is often defensive, something like, “Of course, I’m always trying to do better.”
It’s easy to understand the defensiveness. Senior leaders are successful by definition and tend to have a lot of autonomy and freedom, so they don’t get much critical feedback or coaching. That can lead to major blind-spots in their performance. The reality is that leaders, like everyone else, get comfortable with their practices and want to believe that what they are doing is as good as it can be. Their decision making practices included. After all, they are the leaders and decision making is what got them to where they are. Didn’t it?
Unfortunately, the decision making practices most leaders use, and will steadfastly defend, are costing their companies’ profits every day, of every year. These are profits that can never be recovered.
The reason is that most leaders are dependent upon spreadsheet decision-making models filled with traditional cost-accounting data that has been used in the same ways for over 50 years. Even with the advent of ERPs and other systems delivering more data than can ever be used, it simply isn’t possible to navigate all the enterprise trade-offs, constraints and fluctuating data using these models.
Inevitably, leaders are forced to set their team’s sights on ‘better-than-last’ performance goals often referred to as year over year or month over month, simply because they don’t have a viable process to identify and pursue their full potential, or what we call their Best-Possible.
It is simple logic that if you don’t know what your best can be, there is little or no chance you will achieve it. Even when you do know how good you can be achieving it is never easy.
Fortunately, there are new tools available for today’s leaders who are willing to consider new practices and replace the well-worn tools of decades past. They are called profit optimization systems and they act like a GPS for your enterprise profitability. They reliably analyze all the complexities of your business and lock in on your best-possible profit opportunity while also identifying your profit-forfeiting constraints.
With the entire leadership team’s sights set on the full potential of the enterprise, achieving your best-possible becomes a viable journey, and performance is bound to improve.
Leadership can be a lonely role when things aren’t going well, which can make even the best of us more defensive. Overcoming our natural defensiveness may be the best opportunity any leader has to achieve their BestPossible.
After all, GPS technology revolutionized guidance for explorers, drivers, golfers, sailors and even pilots. You had to know it was just a matter of time before technology revolutionized decision making for your business.
Category: Performance Management / HR