People
Issue No. 20 - December/January 2005
Mis-placing Success
by James Wiggins and Sally Day
Business success is never a simple coincidence. A certain number of factors always work together to transform the practice of a trade, a profession, or any business activity, into a sustainable and then successful business operation. Most businesses can easily put their finger on the technical success factors. But there are a whole range of intangible ones most don’t identify or simply choose not recognise, in their business planning.
You could simply call it "the way you do business": but there are a complex group of behavioural and attitudinal factors that are typically the difference between successful and struggling companies. And, quickly growing businesses are at most risk of failing by ignoring these intangible factors in their business planning.
The single biggest influence on productivity and revenue generation are employee attitudes and their resulting behaviours. The degree to which individuals actually follow – or choose to exceed - ideal practices, procedures, and even the letter of their own job descriptions, is typically dictated by personal motivations and their level of commitment to a task in particular, or the organisation in general. To be successful, businesses now need their people to have certain attitudes and adopt certain mind-sets in applying their skills and abilities to tasks at hand; to exhibit certain behaviours; to hold a certain degree of commitment that leads to the application of individual discretionary effort.
The management of this employee commitment is the most important asset most businesses do not include in traditional business planning, in a coordinated way, to achieve tangible, bottom-line outcomes.
When you start a business, there is little question of your own commitment to do what is required to succeed. Even when you have a small team, or a small team of managers directing a workforce, your commitment becomes tangible through your own attitudes and behaviours in dealing with...
