How you use your time is the key...
A familiar tale. A tale that is resolvable with time and effort - no quick fixes I'm afraid. Three steps:
1. Identify only 1 or 2 people who show the most natural tendency to be able to do what you want them to do - using profile like DISC or Psycuity can help with this. I suggest only 1 or 2 because you are already busy and adding too much more to your schedule will be a recipe for failure.
2. Agree with your 1 or 2 people clear goals/objectives for their skills/knowledge development - with clear and simple ways of measuring performance
3. Invest your time with them doing the work following the four stage mentoring process:
a. Have them watch and learn how you do it - if this is a sales meting then have them in the sales meeting. Have them explain what they learn during each meeting.
b. On low risk (low value) cases allow them to run things while you watch ready to step in and pick up the pieces when necessary. If they are in sales meetings let them run prospect meetings with low value prospects to cut their teeth with you observing, guiding and chipping in
c. As with b. but no chipping in - let them sink or swim. Then review the meeting for TGW and TGR - things going wrong and things going right with them
d. Let them fly solo and have them report immediately what happened and have them review tgw and tgr.
Of course most firms won't do this because of the lost chargeable time and apparent expense of double headed meetings or double-headed reviews or double-headed delivery.
It boils down to the headline of the discussion though - if you don't grow your (key) people you won't grow your firm.
Hope this helps.
Paul Shrimpling
remarkable practice... inspires remarkable results
process implementation
On further reflection...
It seems i spend most of my time with firms working on this one! It's all very well building the systems and processes. It's a completely different matter getting the team to follow those systems.
Hope these pointers help you out:
1. Create opportunities for the key people to see the processes/systems you use at work (and the impact it has on clients) - may need them to attend meetings with you (which I know reduces chargeability)
2. Design the systems together with the people who will be using them - this is a slower way of doing it (might even feel like you are pulling teeth on occasion), but pays off in the long run as they will feel they own their system. DO NOT design them yourself and inflict them on your people they will not comply!
3. Establish a scoring system to track the use of the processes you implement so you and your team can see progress - what gets measure gets done they say (they are right too!)
4. Pigeon steps. Take one small process step at a time. DO NOT instigate loads of process changes at once, chances are nothing will succeed
Paul
-- remarkable practice... inspires remarkable results
thank you Paul
Thanks for the tips Paul, the advice given seems to be almost identical to what others have said - that involving people in the system building process creates a sense of ownership and therefore reduces resistance.
Hopefully we are on the way to achieving this, will update you in March when the process is well under way!
Cheers
same issues here
We are growing our practice, and expect growth to be around 20% this year. The issues we are facing are that I am personally bringing all of this work in, and largely because I am promising clients things they want and that I know I can deliver. The problem is that I don't know if the team could deliver the same, and I am now trying to create a system for training the staff to provide the same level of service I can which is proving difficult! Any ideas how I can replicate what I do through the staff?