Big Q – Inefficiencies

This is the first in a series of reflective questions to kickstart a short reflective discussion at staff meetings.  Feel free to use any of the questions at your next staff meeting and let me know how well the question worked in helping people see the elephant in the room.

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Purpose – to quickly identify some of the organizational inefficiencies that are likely to creep into daily operations.  These are the things that can eventually snowball into major expenses or lost productivity.  Dealing with them now proactively will reduce the need for a disruptive change later.

At your next staff meeting – consider using any of the questions below to kickstart a short 10 min. discussion on organization inefficiencies.  Roll the discussion forward to the next meeting or charter a team if you find a much deeper hole than expected.

·      What frustrates you?  What frustrates the people who work with you?

·      How do we make decisions?  Really, how do we really do this routine activity?

·      Are we always clear in stating why a meeting is convened?

·      How often are meetings rescheduled or extended because all the right people are not in the room?

·      Are decisions or projects delayed because of the time it takes to organize needed information?

·      What rules or policies are outdated?  What is keeping them in place?

·      Are we measuring what is important?

·      What are the implied expectations when we send someone an email, text, phone message, report, etc.?  How are we inadvertently altering work priorities?

·      What do we routinely do without thinking, “is this is still adding value to the organization?”

·      Do we need a “VP of Killing Stuff”?  *** People are often assigned roles to create new things, but rarely is anyone responsible for stopping outdated processes until they become a problem that can no longer be ignored.

Note – if you get excessive pushback about devoting 10 min. of the agenda to this topic – you may have discovered the root cause of organization dysfunction.

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***** These Questions are a work-in-process.  Your feedback is appreciated – what additional questions might be added?  Could any of these questions be worded differently?  Updates will be published in the Workbook for Leading New Era Organizations – free access will be granted to anyone helping to improve the workbook.