About 50% to 70% of business improvement efforts fail according to many studies. Yet I’ve discovered an approach that is delivering a 70% success rate on my improvement work. In this video, I’ll share one piece of the puzzle that has helped make this success possible.
Hi there, Matts Rehnstrom here, Shaper of Business Excellence. In this video, I’m going to talk about the WHY. I see organizations that I work with missing the WHY. A lot of organizations don’t really care about the WHY and why do I talk about the WHY when talking about these business components? Because there’s like a third dimension, this is yes, the two dimensional way, but there’s a third dimension. So underneath all these, or above all these, or around all these, we have the WHY. The WHY is important for an organization. Many organizations don’t have the WHY.
Without Your WHY You Are Like a Ship Without a Sail
The organizations don’t have a WHY. The team doesn’t have a WHY or the team members don’t have a WHY. And an organization or people, teams that don’t have a WHY is very similar to a ship without a sail, it will be taken in the direction that the wind blows The waves t are going to take the ship wherever the waves or the sea want it to go.
With Your WHY It Is Like Having Control By Having Your Sails Up
But with a WHY, a clear WHY, it’s like having a sail up so you can maneuver your business through the waters of whatever waters you’re in, within your business. So what you need to do is to look into the WHY you have in your organization.
#1 Create Your Why
If you don’t have a WHY at all, then you need to have a WHY. You need to understand the purpose of the organization. WHY is the, uh, the organization there in the first place?
#2 Or Review It If You Already Got Your Why
And if you have a WHY, someone have made this WHY, the purpose, they given you the purpose, then take a look at it and discuss it and discuss what it means to you. And what if you break it down, what does it mean to the team, that WHY? And what does it mean to me as a person, that WHY?
Without an Alignment of Your Why
And if we all have WHYs, the organization has a WHY, the team has a WHY, I have a WHY. Those WHYs should be aligned to each other in order to have a fulfilling work life and doing good at work, delivering good value for our customers.
Because if I have another WHY than the team, we are not, if those two are not aligned, we will have a friction in our work. Because I have the WHY of this direction and the team have the WHY of that direction and how are we going to combine that when we were going to work together. The same goes for the team. If the team has a direction and a WHY leading to that, but the overall organization have a WHY leading to this it’s the same thing. There will be friction.
#3 Align Your WHYs In Different Levels; The Organization, The Team And You
So you need to look into the WHY if you don’t have it again, you need to get it. And if you have it, look at it, talk about it and make sure you’re aligned with all the WHY’s that you have. Um, so you might say, “Okay, Matts, that sounds great, but we can’t align thousands of people and their WHYs.”
No, I understand, of course really not. I mean you can’t really do that in the first place. But what would you can do is that you can set the WHY for the organization. Because the clearer the WHY is for the organization, the clearer the WHY will be for the teams. And then could people, if they had a WHY could align their WHY to the team and to the organization.
Without Any WHY, In Any Level, You Have Nothing To Align To
But if you don’t have the organization, WHY and don’t have the team, WHY, what should a person do? The people out here, they don’t really know what should they align to? There is nothing to align to which means that you will have, if you have thousands of people, you will have thousands of WHYs. Instead of making sure that this is how this is the meaning of our business, this is what we’re doing here.
#4 Everyone Should Be Involved In The Creation of the WHY
And to finish up, you also need to make sure that the WHY is not something that the top level management created sometime way back. You need to take that and talk about it. As I said before, it’s so important. It can’t be just put on the shelf somewhere and that’s the y and x and you can’t do that and expect that everyone will follow along and will understand what’s it all about.
So I didn’t go into any of these components you say? No, I didn’t because I was talking about like a third dimension laying all over those. In the next video I will dive into one of these components. If you like to have this poster for free so you can follow along when I’m talking about these components, click this link and it will take you to page where you can download it for free of course. And with that said, good luck and let’s go and shape our business for excellence.
