Factoring Blog - For Small Businesses

Examine the life of any great leader and you will see him putting priorites into action.

Every time Norman Schwarzkopf assumed a new command, he didn’t just rely on his leadership intuition; he also reexamined the unit’s priorities.

When Lee Iacocca took over Chrysler, the first thing he did was to reorder its priorities.

When explorer Roald Amundsen succeeded in taking his team to the South Pole and back, it was due, to his ability to set the right priorities.

Successful leaders live according to the Law of Priorities. They recognize that activity is not necessarily accomplishment. In fact they have an uncanny knack for addressing multiple priorties with every action taken.

Do you set priorities effectively for your organization?

Setting Priorities is the Name of the Game

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The number one reason people don’t do what you want them to do?

They don’t know what you want them to do!!!

You might not believe this, but there are a bunch of people stumbling around out there who don’t have a clue what’s expected of them — 50 percent of all people if you pay attention to the research.

Some of these people report to you — and as frustrating as you might find this, they simply don’t know prcisely what you want them to do.

Communicating explicit expectations may well be the most dificult aspect of a managers job. But it is absolutely essential to creating a high performance workplace.

At the very least, the expectations you communicate to your direct reports must include quantity, quality, and time frame.

I suggest you find a quiet room and start making a list of what you expect from each of your direct reports. A specific list. You might be surprised how difficult this is.

Then meet with each of your people individually and ask them what they think you expect of them. As them what specific results they think they are responsible for.

It will make you want to scream. But it’s worth it.

More on Getting Your Staff to Do What You Want Them to Do and other wisdom.

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Tip of the hat to Sallie Lux of the law firm Brouse McDowell for the advice below.

Just having a document retention policy is not good enough. It must be implemented and reviewed on a regular basis. In fact it is good practice to review it annually just to make sure there haven’t been any major changes in the legal requirements with with respect to any different areas of document retention.

Here are five additional tips to lesson the likelihood your firm will get in trouble.

1. Have and follow a written document retention and destruction policy that complies with applicable statuatory or regulatory laws governing retention of certain types of documents.

2. Make sure that any retention policy contains suspension procedures to be employed when litigation becomes reasonably foreseeable.

3. Communicate with employees to ensure that they are aware of the company’s obligation to preserve evidence and what types of information might be subject to preservation.

4. Involve counsel early to identify types and locations of electronically stored data that may contain information that is relevant to a lawsuit.

5. Involve in-house technology personell to maintain and preserve potentially relevant information.

Once developed, policies must be implemented consistently. Just having a policy is not good enough, you need to follow it.

**Kudos to Smart Business Magazine for sharing this timely information.

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Can a highly operations focused small service company (50 employees) move into a high organic growth orientation?

Usually a high growth orientation means taking more risk, risk in new business proposals, risks in pricing for services, risks in the delivery challenges that are taken on.

These risks types bring great stress to the operations side of the enterprise in that timeframes for response and delivery get shorter, risk factors may get missed in pricing new types of deals and operations management pressure will increase.

Questions for you:

- How can leadership best prepare the operations management for this orientation shift?

- What types of planning and organizational evolution should take place PRIOR to this shift?

- What are the organizational culture influences that need to be addressed before launching this major change?

Any thoughts or comments you might have around this scenario would be great, leave me a comment.

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In 2004, 800 megabytes of new information was created for each man, woman, and child on the earth — with 92% of it stored on magnetic media, primarily hard drives.

Businesses today use more than 500 million desktop computers that together have the capacity to store over 300,000 terabytes of information.

The number of email messages sent per day this year will number around 60 billion and over 500 million people will use Instant Messaging.

With this environment in mind do you have an Information Management Compliance strategy? Do you have legal, regulatory or business needs that make a compliance strategy a necessity?

How trustworthy, accurate and reliable is your electronic information? Is your company prepared for the ever growing need for increased transparency demanded by its constituencies?

I have found a good place to start is an organization called AIIM. AIIM strives to be THE source for support in solving business content challenges.

How long can you tread water?