By Dan Kurth / June 13, 2016 / Uncategorized / 0 Comments
NCAA National Champion football coach Lou Holtz once said “Motivation is simple. You eliminate those who are not motivated”. By process of elimination, any organization or business can become its best. The methods used to do that are simple, but require a commitment to excellence and consistency of effort within the organization. The two areas of continuous improvement that have the greatest impact on businesses are employees and customers. That is not to say that systems and processes cannot be improved as well, but those improvements typically happen as a byproduct of improving your employees and your customer or client base.
Every business that employs more than one person can rank their employees. This is not an exercise in opinion, rather a ranking of aptitude, experience and performance that exposes the strengths and weaknesses of each employee within the company. It then becomes the action portion of a regular performance review. As businesses grow, the reality is that they may have employees who were brought in to fill a need due to the shear volume increase of the business, but they were not really the right fit. As companies continue to grow and hang on to those employees, they become a drag on the performance of the entire operation. This is a key fact that must be understood by managers or business owners when deciding how to deal with poorly performing employees. The choice isn’t just whether or not to eliminate a bad employee, it is also a choice to improve the overall performance of the business or put everyone, including the owners, at risk of losing what they have worked to develop. The Legacy Alpha employee ranking system works on a five point scale of five job related indicators. The employee and his/her direct manager rank each category as a part of the regular employee review process. Action items are identified by low scores, and improvement or elimination are the two choices for the course of action going forward.
Ranking customer/client performance may seem more complex than ranking employees, but it can be very simple once the proper metrics are applied. The ranking components for your customer base include pay, profits and problems. How does the customer pay their bills? How profitable are they overall for your business? And, how many problems do they create in the process of selling your product/service to them? Some types of businesses, like service companies, might have recurring business that can identify specific customers when asking these questions. Other types of businesses can rank by classification of customers or product/service types to determine the same thing. Elimination of problem customers, slow payers or customers who are difficult to deal with is the beginning of a process that creates a culture of excellence for the business. But, this is only one half of the equation. The elimination of a “poor” customer with out replacing them with a “good” customer is simply an exercise in slow death for the business.
The Legacy Alpha program helps you define your culture by showing you how to continuously improve your employees and your customer base in a purposeful and ongoing way. Imagine a world where you have the best, most productive employees and the best, most profitable customers. Then imagine what that leaves for your competitors.