Do Less to Get More
Is your team too busy to be successful?
Reject the ‘Do More with Less’ Myth. Pause, prioritize, and innovate instead.
Dealing with a slew of rapid changes could make your head spin. Your team might be jumping from one fire to the next. Everyone may be asked to ‘do more with less,’ but this approach isn’t sustainable and often backfires. You don’t have to keep doing things the same way, and you probably don’t need to do more. Instead, help your team work smarter and more strategically. Help them do less and think creatively to get better results.
Logically, we know that the result of being spread too thin is that quality suffers, the effort occurs too late, and people get burned out. It’s not a good way to run an organization, so why does it happen?
Reasons people try to do too much instead of focusing on what matters most:
1. The status quo is familiar and takes effort to change.
2. Perceptions associated with saying “no” and doing less are risky. The work culture values heroic efforts.
3. We tend to think more is better, even if it’s not.
4. People don’t see alternatives and can’t decide where to focus.
Your people are working hard, but are they working on the right things?
Your team may need help prioritizing and identifying alternatives.
So, How Should You Prioritize?
What’s your strategy tell you? A good strategy creates focus because it defines the few, best objectives to achieve your goals. A good strategy is elegant and compact, not a disconnected list of to-do’s. Ideally, strategy unites departments in shared objectives that prevent silos.
If your strategy can’t help you prioritize what’s most important now, it’s time for an update.
If you need to address rising supply costs, staffing challenges, new competitors, or changing customer expectations, and your strategy isn’t pointing toward a viable answer, it’s time for an update. To uncover innovative solutions to new challenges, pause and make space to revisit your strategic objectives.
Here’s where to start: Find out what’s most important to customers.
To do less and get better results, you need to prioritize what’s most important to customers now.
A customer-centered way to prioritize
If you want confidence that you’re prioritizing the right things, keep these points in mind.
Crunch the numbers. What can you learn from customer KPIs like sales trends, retention, & acquisition?
Review customer satisfaction results. What types of customer feedback are tracked and used for planning?
Talk to your frontline staff. These team members hear a lot. Do they have a productive forum to share and discuss customer feedback objectively? Are internal biases and historical ways of thinking openly challenged?
Get timely customer feedback (< 1-2 years old). Given how fast things change, customer research should be fresh, and there should be a process for using it regularly for improvements and innovation.
Align has a tool that helps you easily identify where to focus.
First - you need to assess where you are and what areas need your attention.
We created the Strategy Scorecard to help clients find the right starting point for any strategic change project.
The Strategy Scorecard helps you evaluate which strategies generate solid results and where things are out of alignment. You’ll look at purpose, finances, customer value, staffing, and systems. Once you have a better picture of where the gaps exist, you can hone in on these areas to improve customer value.
Download the Strategy Scorecard here!
If this sounds like what you need to work on, let’s chat.
Every project is different, and I’m always happy to help you explore your options.