Archive for the ‘Results-Oriented Strategy’ Category

The most basic business concept we have is: Show us good results in order to justify yourself.

The auto makers haven’t done this. Their business model is out-of-date. Oh yes, they gave customers what they wanted, but they shouldn’t have. Management should have been smarter. We don’t need all of the models offered. We don’t need last generation technology. We don’t need all of the dealerships and inventory. We don’t need bloated bureaucracies. And we don’t need the UAW wanting more and more of everything.

When cars replaced horses, carriage makers and horsewhip makers went out of business. Sure, business is more complex than a century ago, but get with the times.

Not only do the auto makers need to be clear about the results they propose, they need to propose the right results.

Should women be prohibited to work with bare legs? This question in 2008 in the USA??? Whoa! Some young women have never even owned panty hose. Have they even heard of garter belts except at Victoria Secrets?

Who will see their bare legs? An offended customer? An excited co-worker? What is the issue here?

On the day that we read the news article about hose, we visited with a nurse (BSN level) who helped us greatly with care options for Roger’s mother—very professional. She wasn’t wearing hose. Now, if the nursing profession can move from starched white caps and uniforms and standing up when a doctor entered the nursing stations to bare legs, the rest of the workforce can surely relax.

Hey folks, let’s focus on job results and forget the little stuff.

If trust, adaptability, democratization, fluid boundary definition, long-term strategy, collective thinking and maintaining continuity while dealing with constant change are benchmarks for the “new” organization, then job descriptions detailing specific tasks that narrow an employee’s attention span are definitely not “haute” style.

A results-oriented job description charts an organization responsibility that defines goals to be accomplished, and invites employees to apply their talents in pursuit of the organization purpose.

Telecommuting forces a manager to take a different managing style with employees, actually one that’s more in line with good managing, that is, managing for results. What matters at work—wherever the work is performed—is what an employee accomplishes, that is, the output, the outcomes, the results of doing the work.

With a teleworker, you can’t just walk up to the workstation to see what’s going on. (In fact, don’t even hire a teleworker whom you can’t trust to manage his/her own work.) Maybe you can track inputs and time on line, but mainly what you want to check is results produced.

So, the job description of a teleworker (well, actually of any worker) should center on expected results, including the standards by which the results must be accomplished.

Personal work styles differ, too. People work at different paces. When you stop to think of it, working in an office can be pretty constricting where overseeing is fairly obvious. When managers and employees agree on expected results, and measure according to results, employees are free to take responsibility for their actions and to accomplish desired results in different ways.

We think. We act. Where a desired result is involved in our thoughts and actions, the result serves as a beacon to focus our attention and actions. Said in the obverse, without a result in mind, our thoughts and actions will be scattered and inefficient.

With a result in mind, the aptness of the information we gather and the effectiveness of the actions we consider can be immediately evaluated.

Furthermore, the deeper we dig into the understanding of the result we desire, the clearer we can be as to the true nature of our desires and the correctness of our actions.

Employees, for example, will be more productive and more representative of the organization purpose when they understand what their job actions are supposed to accomplish. Children will better understand lessons (from teachers and from parents) when they understand how new information can accomplish important goals.

What are we doing here, anyway?