25 Jan Putting Systems in Your Business Without Boring Your Team | Business Acceleration Team
This month, we are sharing another blog post from Eric Knam with Business Acceleration Team. Eric is a certified business coach providing business help, advice, and mentoring services to small and medium-sized businesses. We’ve watched many of our business colleagues move from working IN their business to working ON their business, enjoying the perks of being the boss as a result of partnering with Eric.
Keep reading to learn more about how to incorporate effective systems into your business without boring your team!
Incorporating Effective Business Systems
If you are like most people, you wind up getting some of your best ideas when you are in the shower. Why is that? Well, whenever you jump in the shower, you end up spending time doing something that you’ve done since you were a child. Your mind is on autopilot, so it knows it can take a couple of minutes to think.
When you simplify and systematize routine tasks in your business, you can give your employees that same mental holiday, which will give them time to be creative.
How Ethos3 Unleashes the Creativity of Their Team
Ethos3 is a Nashville-based company that specializes in creating presentation designs. By focusing on just one thing, they were able to systematize their processes much more efficiently than most other design firms.
They systematized their business development process by using a templated proposal that includes everything their future customer needs to know – how many slides they’ll get, the number of revisions, and the pricing formula.
For project management, they created a systematized approach for each step of the process. Templates are in place for each stage, and their project delivery approach is the same every time. It’s a recipe – just add water.
When employees have a procedure to follow for the boring stuff, they don’t need to worry about what they need to do. Instead, they can focus their creativity on how to do it.
As entrepreneurs, we often assume that everyone likes the adventure of making things up as they go and not knowing what’s around the next bend. This isn’t always the case. Many of your employees would not only prefer some consistency and structure, but they would also thrive with it.
Systems are not the enemy of creativity. As a matter of fact, author and organizational strategist Kathy Kolbe has developed a personality test that proves it. The so-called Kolbe Index ranks users on four personality attributes.
Fact Finder: determines just how much someone likes gathering data before making decisions
Follow Through: identifies how much someone likes systems, structure, and routine
Quick Start: quantifies one’s inclination to start new things
Implementer: measures one’s knack for building stuff
Kolbe’s test shows that, while each of us possesses some level of aptitude for each attribute, we all have a dominant operating style. Most entrepreneurs score high on “quick start” and low on “follow through.”
It’s a classic combination. Often we enjoy starting things, but then the details get boring.
Chances are that most of your employees will score higher than you on follow-through, which means they need more structure to thrive. They may also score higher than you on fact finder, suggesting they need more data than you would before making a decision.
Specializing, and giving your team standard operating procedures gives your employees the mental breathing room to be creative and the structure they need to thrive.