Unlocking Your Full Potential

To unlock the full potential of your organization, business leaders can focus on 5 critical success factors (CSF):

1. People – Hire, empower, train and retain the best. Recruit smart, creative and passionate professionals with an unquenchable thirst for growth. A balance of both IQ and EQ (emotional) is important – a deficiency in either will certainly hinder your full potential.

2. Process – Stand still and you will fall behind. Measure or you will not improve but measure for the sake of improving behavior. As S. Covey noted, begin with the end in mind. And most importantly think big but act small and often – adopt a Kaizen approach of incremental change for the better.

3. Innovation – Outsmart the completion with the best and affordable tools but remember a lean process is the first step before you focus on the right tool.

4. Structure – Remove boundaries, flatten the hierarchy, and be adaptable. Structural elasticity can strengthen functional alignments (i.e. services and engineering) and propel you closer to reaching your full potential.

5. Culture – I was very fortunate to attend a luncheon with General Colin Powell as he shared his views of the importance of a purpose driven mindset. It’s good for organizations to have performance goals but it’s even better to adopt a purpose driven culture with emphasis on execution velocity, rejection of mediocrity, transparency, respect and enthusiasm for hard work and creativity. Our company’s mantra is ‘there is nothing more important than our customers’. Our purpose is to become our customers trusted advisor and favorite vendor to do business with.

To begin the journey of unlocking our full potential, I would like to focus on the first CSF – people. Hypothetically speaking, if you were given a choice to hire between two candidates, would you hire the ‘fast and sloppy’ or the ‘slow and good’ candidate? I know what you are thinking but assume you had no choice but to hire one of the two candidates. If you have ever competed athletically or coached then you might gravitate to ‘fast and sloppy’ because experience tells you that you cannot teach fast. On the other hand, if you subscribe to the ‘do it once, do it right’ school of thought then ‘slow and good’ is your choice. The challenge is to find the optimal balance that produces fast and good results.

Flat organizations are likely to place their employees into 3 categories: the thinkers, the doers, and the watchers. Your A-players are a combination of thinkers and doers so in order to unlock your team’s full potential you need to stop watching and do. The strength of your leadership, at all levels of the organization, will enable you to seek the optimal balance. Your hiring process is very important but the key to unlocking your team’s full potential is to retain and fully engage top talent. Once you have achieved a balance of fast and good, then you must work hard to develop an environment that fosters continuous improvements and growth. A flexible (telecommuting friendly) but challenging (performance score-carding) environment with market competitive compensation, accessibility to training, and most importantly a culture of inclusion will bolster your employee retention. Remember, no one of us is as smart as all of us so seek to understand before you are understood.

Recent industry data highlighted contact center average annual attrition levels at 27% (and north of 40% for offshore outsourced services). Since 2005, Enterasys has recognized less than 2% annual voluntary attrition levels in our customer support organization. It is worthwhile noting that the benefit of hiring and retaining top talent is real. In 2010, CRM Magazine recognized Enterasys as 1 of only 5 companies to earn a Service Elite distinction. Enterasys was the only technology company to earn this distinction and the only company to be recognized for multiple award categories including workforce optimization and enterprise feedback management. Check out the article here.

And finally, for what it’s worth, if forced to choose only one candidate, my choice would be ‘fast and sloppy’. I can expand more if you are interested but before we start to debate it’s important to note that even the best coaches and teams sometimes have to trade players to further improve. The management philosophy of ‘top-grading’ is one of guiding principles that has proven to optimize our recruitment, hiring, and retention success – http://www.smarttopgrading.com. As long as you maintain a flexible, decisive and fair mindset then you can take comfort in knowing that an iterative process will ultimately provide your organization with the balance you seek.

There will be future editorials regarding the other 4 critical success factors in a series of discussions that speak to improving organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Is there another critical success factor(s) to consider? I plan to add a 6th CSF in our playbook but I am curious to learn about your success stories and pursuit of achieving full potential.

My Twitter contact: @valaafshar