Business improvement is for life!
There’s so much good stuff on the TV at the moment about building a better business.
Did you see Can Gerry Robinson Fix the NHS on TV last week? Readers of my last blog are going to wonder if all I do is watch TV, but to be honest working in business improvement is for life, not just for Christmas — you can’t just switch it off!
Anyway back to Gerry Robinson. This blue-eyed gentle guru is obviously tougher than he looks, having spent a lifetime in industry (including giants such as Granada, Compass and BskyB) he now plays for fun, and fun for him is tackling something as challenging as the NHS.
As the story unfolded over three nights we saw a sorry catalogue of misguided resources, rigid processes, poor leadership, disempowered staff, personal empire building and sabotage …. yes everything you’d see in a badly run business was right there in the NHS.
What fascinated me was how Gerry was going to fix this. After all, it’s much easier to make changes in a small business, isn’t it? His methodology however was exactly the same as that you’d use to bring about change in a small business and it was an absolute master class in good leadership. The programme illustrated for me more clearly that anything I have ever seen before the difference between management and leadership, and how important leadership is in business success.
I come across business owners every week who have poor leadership skills. (The worst being one man who spent his time in his office with a CCTV system to spy on his staff and then would rush out to tell them off them every so often!) Often there’s a belief amongst business owners that you have to be Attila the Hun to be a strong leader, or that leadership is something big organisations do, not small companies. Wrong on both counts as gentle Gerry demonstrated with the NHS. His consultative, persuasive, quiet manner and his habit of walking the floor and talking with front line staff about problems and how they could be fixed worked wonders (witness waiting times in some departments reduced from 6 months to two weeks!)
It made me think about how important good leadership can be in achieving bottom line results. The best I’ve seen is a company I worked with a few years ago that added £100k to their bottom line in just one year as a result of being better leaders and consulting with their staff about how to improve their processes. We can’t promise that result every time but here at Business Link we’ve had loads of successes with helping companies fix their problems that has resulted in better sales, better profits, fewer debts, more customers, better processes, cost savings…. I could go on, but then as I told you, business improvement is for life, not just for Christmas!
January 16th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Moira, just wanted to say how much I’m enjoying your posts!
Keep it up.