In working with clients this week, two originated having a tendency to get into a rut which leads to continuing to have the same problems they’re unhappy with. In both cases, we were able to create desirable changes for them. Here’s how you can do it, too!
How Many Chiefs vs. How Many Indians?
I have been assisting clients with their hiring and business structure for many years, and this week I ran into a mistake you may be making. A start-up client has managed to assemble an impressive array of excellent personnel to help him complete development of his medical orthopedic device. Somehow in the process he had gotten over-busy, spending all his time in meetings, unable to get things done. Sound familiar?
When we analyzed it, he’d assembled 18 Indians and no chiefs. So, he had 18 eager people reporting to him, wanting to speak to him, asking him for instructions and advice and scheduling meetings with him. There is an optimum number of chiefs vs. Indians, but 18 to 1 is not it!
Fortunately for this client, I’ve seen this plenty of times before and knew that there is a set of tools created just for him! We jumped into rapidly completing an Organizing Board for him and selecting some promising Indians we could promote to “Temporary-till-You-Prove-Yourself Deputy Chiefs.” We set up an additional system whereby the boss could handle his overload, too, and his company’s prospects immediately brightened considerably.
What about Those Unconfrontable Backlogs?
Another client has a very high-quality, cutting edge product which he’s been developing for years.
What do you do with the early pioneer customers? Their systems were all cutting-edge unique prototypes, each awesomely different. Trying to build a standardized business on top of all the experimental systems creates special problems.
While having happy early customers is a big plus, reevaluating all their prototype systems and bringing them all up to the current system standards is a full-time job. And there is little time for it in a fast- moving new company.
Your situation may be different, but I’m sure you’ve experienced the overload of too much to do in too little time.
What’s in my bag of tricks for this? Is there any solution to bring this off to a win for one and all?
Yes, this situation begs for a proper mixture of cope (make it go right somehow, anyhow) and organize (so this doesn’t continue to happen to you). We used one of my favorite tools for organizing, the Administrative Scale of Importance (Admin Scale). The piece that made the breakthrough is this case was taking the Strategic Plan we worked out and turning it into a step-by-step written Program where each action laid out could be easily understood, confronted and done.
There are still the challenges of making it happen, but it’s amazing how much easier it is to handle things if one can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I’ve been involved in improving situations like these for hundreds of businesses. Why keep struggling with problems that don’t resolve?
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