Why did you choose this topic today?
So much effort on your part to survive and grow, in a hostile Argentine context, for private activity, motivates me to share tools that lead you to strategically rethink your business model and profitability scheme. Also questions that ignite your ability and creativity in making decisions for the health of your business and your own well-being.
Today, more than ever, developing agility and aptitude to neutralize unforeseen threats in the context, or create/take advantage of opportunities, are what will make your numbers leave you with a better taste.
The 3 hidden secrets
There is no strategy, technique, model or business theory that works properly if any of these secrets are not expressed. I present to you:
1) I BUILT TRUST
Stephen Covey (h) in his book “The Speed of Trust”, provides a new look, stating that trust IS measurable through costs and results. He exposes how organizations that develop environments of trust are more agile, effective, innovative and generate greater results, which is why he speaks of the “economy of trust”.
If there is trust between people, the speed of the processes increases, meetings, explanations and discussions are avoided. Consequently, costs decrease and new and better businesses are generated.
+ TRUST + AGILITY – COSTS + SALES + RESULTS
I can affirm this relationship through the experience of more than 20 years building trust with a systemic perspective in the corporate sphere with commercial, productive, financial teams and its value chain. We developed a competitive advantage through agility in decisions because there was “that something else” that is built and conquered.
I also experience it in different teams within the same company, as a coach and consultant.
The teams that show outstanding performance and better indicators are those with leaders focused on people and learning, generating better conversations, responsible autonomy, self-confidence and confidence in the rest of the members. It’s amazing how when you develop and track accurate indicators over time, you can look at it empirically.
On the contrary, those teams with more coercive leadership that do not encourage learning, and their members are afraid to expose their ideas, have more breakages, delays, and errors that end up affecting the client and your results.
When you trust, fears evaporate, you look ahead, and PREDISPOSE TO ACT! If you generate it in yourself, you spread it to your team, you will be creating a culture, a habit of generating projects, responses and solutions, in a world that is becoming obsolete and threatening faster and faster.
Does the increase in costs eat away at your numbers? You will see how to find other closer customers or how to add value at origin together with others. As the men and women of our beloved Córdoba did, being an example. While the numbers and the climate made it unfeasible to plant corn, today they are the 5th producing territory in the world, because they managed to industrialize it in origin with their bioethanol plants, their pig and poultry farms. They did not stay in the complaint! They wondered what we can do to continue producing corn hundreds of km from the port? And they did it together! They are an example of public-private articulation.
Also alliances to be more competitive in costs. How do we get together with others to make joint purchases or contracts? How to find the way to be more efficient? How to get out of the complaint?
What you cannot do is keep doing the same thing when the context changed the rules of the game without warning.
WITH CONFIDENCE, NEW POSSIBILITIES OF ACTION OPEN
2) GENERATE WORK SATISFACTION and COMMITMENT
Although job satisfaction is a personal “interpretation”, what is concrete is that the companies that register better levels of satisfaction in their people, have more committed teams and generate greater results.
Are sales, pricing or marketing strategies worth it if the spirit and talent of your people “DOES NOT CONNECT” with the values, objectives set in the company and the needs of customers?
How are you connecting with yourself, your team and your value chain?
A study that reveals evidence
Across nearly 50,000 business units in 45 countries, Gallup researchers found that workgroups that received strengths interventions increased sales by 10% to 19% and profits by 14% to 29%, compared with other control groups that did not receive such interventions.
- Leading a better application of the strengths of workers will require companies to give them greater participation and autonomy. Higher levels of autonomy promote the development and implementation of new ideas.
- They conclude that the companies that prioritize the commitment of their teams will be the ones that help their country achieve stability and better standards of living. And the work they create will provide a sense of self-esteem and optimism about the future.
I add that it is important to consider the different assessments according to age groups and that the motivations of millennials are very different from generation X or Y. It is urgent to create spaces where each generation can complement their strengths.
3) CONNECTION+COMMUNICATION
The biggest complaint of SMEs and producers is the tax and pension pressure. However, when these stages are reached, it is time to ask ourselves what we did NOT do and what the sectors that do not carry weight on their backs do.
Requiem to the soybean dollar. Where the state and less ability to pay for exports take more than 60% of the gross.
Society fails to understand, how then it is harmed by the reality of increasingly expensive food, with ever thinner pockets, where it perceives the sector as a demon that in addition to earning money, pollutes, therefore celebrating a greater burden prosecutor because that is how “they sold to the sector”.
It is time to stop looking for culprits, which is a declaration of incompetence and the excuse to remove the bond, and reflect on how this reality came to be.
More and better communication is necessary with the sector itself, the state and society because when we realized it they boiled us like a frog. What did we do while they sold us “ecological leather” when it is made with petroleum derivatives that do pollute?
And so, while we continued to keep our heads down, forging ahead to produce better, we reached a point where we had to bury the hides, with price and environmental complications, when what is sustainable (economic, environmental and social) is to use natural leather because it is a way to take advantage of all its resources to the animal and the leather does not become a waste.
This as an example, of the need to rethink that there are silences that are expensive, and that they also take margins. That it is not enough to look at our navel, bow our heads and continue producing efficiently if we do not go out the gates/doors outside, we get involved as a sector and join voices to communicate better and sit down to dialogue to make your activity sustainable, which impacts the productive ecosystem.
It goes to all sectors. Each one will have their reality to defend, through the institutions that bring together your activity, since the fiscal, union and financial burden on private activity only achieves more pressure and less oxygen for those who manage to survive, encouraging informality.
I SALUTE YOU
We share that high levels of TRUST, WORK COMMITMENT, CONNECTION + COMMUNICATION are the 3 hidden secrets that need to be revealed to improve your profitability.
These qualities, called by many “soft”; I wonder: is that so? Or are they skills that become “hard” to generate, inspire and develop?
Of course, technical or “steel” skills are extremely necessary and indispensable, only they are not enough to ensure results that make businesses sustainable.
When I defined my mission:
“Inspire people and organizations to discover their strengths, train for their development and complement each other, providing innovative and sustainable solutions for individual and collective well-being.”
I am in tune, in that happiness of feeling that I am on the right path. It gives me the satisfaction that I “confirm in numbers”, based on that mix of “brain and heart”, that a client once told me.
Because, ultimately, what the numbers shout, whisper or sing of joy is a consequence of who we are and the attitudes we undertake.
CPN – Professional Ontological Coach
Source: Ambito
