GUEST BLOGGER

Jenni Murphy-Scanlon, Strategy Specialist, shares her real world no BS tips, tools and tactics that will make your business strategy unique, valid and exciting.

Do you have a strategy for your business?  If you do, is it effective?  Is it making your job as a manager, executive or business owner easier?  If you answered no to any of these, you may need to review your strategy.

In my line of work I see a lot of strategic plans.  Many of them are wordy and complicated.  But that is not the biggest problem... 

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A proven brilliantly basic method on how to fully engage staff in their work

For years now I have been helping leaders to get there staff fully engaged.  Two major requirements are expectation and accountability. These two words have been done to death. They are almost stale and redundant because leaders are using them and not following up.

My simple meeting format will make all the difference to your business team and business growth.  One meeting a week will create calls to action and easily enforce expectation and accountability.  It will also create a great learning environment.

Here it is… 

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How to win a $20-million business deal with a really basic question!

I was asked by a client to review a pitch they were making to secure the management of a $20,000,000 superannuation fund.  This pitch was set for 30minutes to the board of a large company.  My client had three presenters and would be the 8^th fund manager to do the pitch – seven other companies were pitching ahead of them.  This meant the board of directors they were pitching to would rightfully be tired by the end of the day. This made for a stressful situation, how can you keep peoples interest when you’re last of the rank?

My client diligently set about preparing their slide show presentation to highlight how wonderful they were.  They had everything covered including; global economic trends, interest rates, investment opportunities both low risk and higher risk and offshore opportunities and the list goes on and on and on.  I was seated at the head of the board room table while my clients set about making the pitch.  By the time they got to the 5^th slide I started snoring rudely - as loud as I could, I wanted to make an impact on them.   They looked at me and asked why I was doing this.   I asked them how many slides they had.  They replied 35 slides. I couldn’t help myself “OMG are you kidding me – are you bloody kidding me, 35 boringly tedious slides of numbers and rates and economic torture, come on guys – really, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

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What happens to a business when a 14 year old nails the basics brilliantly?

Several years ago I was working with a client who was struggling to keep his head above water and could not figure out his next move or where to get his next client. He was a project manager and had just finished working on two major developments at an Auckland High School and at Auckland University. 

In his own mind he had decided that the market had slowed down and that business would be hard to come by.  He was tired after a year of very hard slog and needed some space to think.  Unfortunately, the more he thought the more negative he became. It was difficult to see a way forward.  He started to doubt his skills, his knowledge and his value as a professional project manager.

He engaged me as a coach to assist him to get over this business and personal slump. We did some analysis on his work/life balance and also looked at his successful history as a project manager and in particular some of his bigger successes such as the Sky Tower where he was one of a team of managers. I did this to help him value himself up. From here we devised some plans that he was happy with and started an implementation process. We set some simple goals to de-clutter his office and manage his diary. Everything was in place but something was missing. He kept talking himself down which became a real hindrance to his moving forward.

This all changed when his very astute and perceptive 14 year old daughter

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Doing the Basics Brilliantly has Become a Positive Obsession!

The more I focus on the basics the greater the results. It is the whole basis of my coaching now. 

In my experience the basics work, and when they are done brilliantly they get brilliant results.  Too often we take the basics for granted and don’t maximise the power they have.   How often do you hear sports coaches of top teams or business managers say “we have to go back to the basics”!   I want to know why they ever left the basics.

There is a plethora of new technologies and innovations that are supposed to make our lives and businesses easier.  We need to be discerning about what is on offer.  It is easy to get excited about the latest and greatest.  You could upgrade your cell phone every month with all the new innovations being made.  You could have a million apps on your tablet or mobile, but how many are necessary and functional.  You could engage hundreds of social media experts to market you to the world – anything is possible, right?   Doing the basics brilliantly is not about what you can add – it is more about what you should avoid or take away.

I can honestly say that my successful sports coaching career was down to one reason – I focussed on the basics and aimed to do them brilliantly.  I have said this before in different posts that ‘excellence is doing the basics better than before all day, every day in every way’.   I did not have the technology to help me for most of my sports coaching career.   I had a journal where I recorded time trials and I had a stop watch that could record 100 lap times.   I also had the use of video camera and that was it.   These are the basics.  They worked – we won a lot of medals and my athletes were incredibly successful.

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