Every day, every week and every month, your organization faces threats of extinction not just from outside competition or other outside forces, but it really faces threats from the inside through complacency, laziness and the unwillingness to change. Also, having the idea that you are successful may also harm your future in the long term. If your organization is making sales and making a profit, you may feel hesitant about changing anything, because if you do, you believe that you could lose sales, but that is false thinking. Be watchful of changing markets, improvements to technology, and industry best practices.
“A well-meaning team of people can sometimes make horrible decisions that no single individual would make.” -Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly
Here are 5 items that have the potential to harm your organization and your future:
- Lack of a vision. If you lack direction and goals, your organization and team will fail in the long run. You must develop a shared and common vision that has short and long term goals. Your team members have to believe in that vision too.
- Complacent Filled Success. Having positive results consistently will breed complacency and the unwillingness to change due to the fear of losing sales; however, if you don’t keep assessing the future and the market, a competitor may enter with a better product and without innovation; your product will become obsolete. The conditions will change and if you don’t address the problem, your customers will leave.
- Groupthink. A bad idea can get even worse when everyone agrees with it. Groupthink creates an atmosphere of conformity where opposing opinions are suppressed or people are afraid to go against the group. Avoid this. Embrace the one person who is seeing it differently. If you don’t have that person on your team, go find him or her.
- Laziness. It is too easy to get complacent. Every day you have to keep your team fired up to do great things. Don’t settle in over a little success. Don’t quit over a little failure. Keep looking for new opportunities and as we say in the Army, you have to do “position improvement,” which is part of the “priorities of work.”
- No investments. Reinvest your profits back into your business with capital expenditures for your facilities and your product and service lines. Additionally, invest in your people with training, better equipment, better facilities, better benefits, and a better community. You may be asking: how can I do this? I am barely making payroll and I am not paying myself. Start with creating an environment of success filled with support, guidance, and the desire to win.
Leaders have to be mindful of all these issues when going through the business cycle. Guard against these issues. Groupthink is especially powerful particularly if the owner or senior leader is proposing a bad idea. Don’t surround yourself with “yes men.” They will doom you and your organization by agreeing too easily.
What areas are you having trouble with that seem to be trying to destroy your organization from the inside? Please comment or email me at comment@stephenmclain.com.
Copyright 2016-Stephen McLain