4 Questions That Will Help Focus Your Day-to-Day Energy on Growth

The key to bold growth is liberating your leaders. In facilities where complicated systems reign, nearly everyone has their hands in the daily details of producing the product or delivering the services. Managers and front-line leaders (as well as top executives and even the CEO) are tangled up in running the day-to-day aspects of the business. The front-line activities are so unpredictable, unreliable and complicated and the systems surrounding them often are so excessive that the managers can’t seem to pull themselves away. Time and energy are consumed by unimportant tasks rather than activities that produce sustained personal and organizational growth.

Yet, the best predictor of future success can be attributed to the amount of time you, as the leader of your company, spend on growth. Think about your actions and daily activities. Ask yourself these four questions:

1. Do you enable and empower your front-line leaders to run the day-to-day activities of your operations?
2. Can they instill change and make decisions to do their job effectively, or do they need to check with you or their managers before making decisions, changing a process or putting out a fire?
3. When your front line has questions or problems, can they resolve it without coming to you to find out what to do?
4. Can your team get product out the door without your help?

If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions, then you’re spending too much effort on the day-to-day and not enough on looking forward. As a result, a refocus of your time and attention is required. As the head of your business, you need to spend the majority of your time on improvement and growth for your business to innovate and move forward while at the same time being efficient.

Is most of your week spent working on improvements that allow you to achieve your goals more effectively? If you aren’t spending the majority of your time working on proactive improvements and identifying new business opportunities, it’s imperative you uncover what is keeping you from doing what you need to do to succeed.

Although key to your success, this is often easier said than done. “Run, Improve, Grow” is a proven business model that shows you how to enable and empower your front-line leaders and outlines the steps you need to take to succeed.

Take this Run Improve Grow assessment (registration required) to determine what’s keeping you in run when you should be developing new products, creating new business opportunities, and entering into new geographies and markets. Stop the firefighting and get busy doing what you do best: creating growth opportunities for your organization.