“Hi there, I’ve come to see Steve”, I said brightly.

As a man they returned their gaze to their computer screens.

They all had the hunched and dejected look of a team that resides at the bottom of the bottom league who are beaten every week they play.

One of them got up, slowly, so slowly I wondered what he was doing at first.

“I’ll take you”, he said and proceeded to walk through a connecting door that led into a cold, musty corridor with a staircase squirreled away at the bottom.

I followed, introducing myself and getting the grunted reply, “Dave Smith, Sales".

Dave didn’t look like any sales person I’ve ever seen. He was wearing a rather dull grey tank top over a white shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows. His ensemble was completed by a pair of badly creased blue chinos and scruffy brown shoes.

We got to the top of the steep flight of stairs and Dave took me into a cramped room dominated by the biggest desk I’d ever seen. The large, comfy looking leather chair contained a young woman who was completely surrounded by piles of paper and with a mobile ringing for her attention.

“Hold on”, she said and scrabbled through the papers before locating the errant phone.

“Sally will sort you out”, Dave said and wandered out of the room and back down the stairs.

Sally finished her conversation and switched her attention to me. “Sorry about that”, she said, “we’ve got the auditors coming next week and I’d forgotten you were coming”.

Which was strange as Sally had only arranged the meeting with me the previous week, less than 6 days ago.

I made a non-committal noise and said, “So where’s Steve?”

She got out of her chair and shook my hand, almost as an afterthought and then asked me to follow her.

We walked down the corridor and she stopped halfway down and looked over the frosting to see whether anyone was in. Then she opened the door and ushered me to Steve’s office.

Steve got up from his seat.

“Thanks for coming Jim we thought it would be useful to get an outside view of the company”, he said.

I looked round his office as I sat down and noticed the lovely picture of his family and also the dusty model of a sailing ship on a large bookcase containing just two books.

Sally closed the door for us and I could hear her shoes briskly tapping down the hall as she went back to her office.

Steve began to tell me everything that was wrong with the current economy and the reasons why they just weren’t getting sales. The reasons simply tripped from his tongue. He claimed that Dave had an impossible job to do because he knew the prospects too well! That meant he didn’t push them to  make any decision. And unfortunately as Dave was also a highly skilled programmer he tended to let himself get sucked into helping on client projects. Which meant the sales force was often down by one man.

In addition two years ago Steve had taken on a saleswoman called Jean who had been bubbling with ideas at her interview but since then had made one small sale.

Now what thing(s) had given me a clue regarding the state of the company? Oh, and don’t worry the people and this company is pure fiction, however every element has happened in at least one company I’ve coached!

Here are some ways that a meeting can go wrong:

a) attendees arriving late
b) People talking to their neighbour (off-topic) during the meeting
c) People wanting to only talk about their topic and hijacking the agenda
d) Weak chairmanship
e) No agenda, "because we know what we’re going to discuss"
f) No follow-up on action items from the previous week
g) Missing attendees who are needed and didn’t say they would be missing
h) Action minutes from previous meeting not available for the meeting
i) Having people attend for the whole meeting when they are only needed for one topic and could leave after it
j) Allowing one person to dominate the meeting and make their point, air their grievance, change the topic mid-stream or give their biased point of view
k) Allowing agenda items to go way over their allotted time (remember the time allocation is only a guide, but it’s a good guide)
l) Meeting length is dictated by the agenda
m) The agenda should not be so long that people lose the will to live part way through. Only you will know what is the right length. Saying it should be 10 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour is irrelevant if you don’t cover your agenda items.
n) The type of meeting makes a difference, for instance an IT project status meeting can be short, whereas a manufacturing plant meeting could be half a day. It all depends on what you need to do and by when
p) The worst thing to do is to come out of the meeting with no action notes and with people unclear as to what they should be doing. So always have a summary of actions at the meeting end.

q) Not sending out an agenda based on the required actions from the meeting and new issues since

r) Having regular meetings that are no longer productive or required

However, the carpers, the doubters and the envious we can do without.

Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt said it best,

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

And that is exactly what business is about. To succeed in business, life or anything you need to “DO.” For without action there’s no forward momentum that powers through the obstacles that life occasionally throws in our paths.

In all the time I’ve been in business there’s no doubt that I meet people in one of two mindsets:

• Those who know they know everything about business
• Those who remain open minded and are willing to try new things

And often the ones who think they know all about business, or have friends who can point them in the right direction don’t understand the value of learning things they don’t know yet. Or of having a coach who holds their feet to the fire when they don’t deliver on agreements.

The other thing they fail to realise is that if you pay for advice you pay attention to it! That means you improve your business. If you don’t pay you put what’s said to the back of your mind and nothing changes.

The open-minded try lots of new things, some work, some don’t. However, if you’ve implemented a new sales strategy that gets in an extra 10% of new sales isn’t that better than just staying as you were?

So when people criticise you for taking positive action refer them to the quote from Teddy Roosevelt.

Business always benefits from improvements focused on the bottom line, either by cutting costs or by making more profits. By far and away the best is to focus on making more profits. After all you can cut costs that can kill the business, either quickly or slowly.

Business Culture Change

Business culture is one thing that can prevent you from making huge strides in business improvement. and the reasons are usually quite simple:

1. Lack of top management interest
2. Lack of top management being used as a model
3. Lack of an executive “sponsor”, maybe perceived as a scapegoat
4. Prevalence of management fads
5. Existence of management by fear or by “being told what to do and shut up”
6. Lack of consistency
7. Lack of commitment when things go wrong
8. Lack of time to implement properly
9. Lack of proper resources to change the culture

A company culture is fostered by top management, whether they realise it or not. For example you may have beautifully written procedures that make sure your customers get the best possible service. However, if top management wants to strip the budget it may be impossible to follow the procedures and then customer service suffers. And a cycle of blame begins, with top management blaming the workers and the workers doing the minimum to stay in their jobs, thus creating further customer dissatisfaction.

Therefore, to implement culture change it’s vital that top management understand why they’re doing it and are all fully committed to the process. Once you’ve understood the culture change necessary you can begin to improve the business.

And there’s no need for this process to take months and land you with a heavy report and vast slide presentation you have to yawn through.

Ways To Implement Change

Business improvement must be fully integrated with business strategy. It’s simply foolish to try and bolt improvements on without any view of the business strategy. Think how you could massively improve customer satisfaction with the UK call centres only to have them move abroad. You’re faced with doing the whole job all over again. Doubling the price of your improvements. With an understanding of the strategy you could have implemented an interim improvement programme that helped the home country call centres and then trained the offshore call centres before they even began operations.

Cherry Pick Your Changes

First make sure you understand all your processes and the costs associated with them. Again this need not take months. We’re not looking for the exact money down to the last penny. We’re looking for a reasonable estimate that can be used to check the improvement has helped.

Then pick processes to improve based on the ease and speed with which change could be implemented and the savings, or extra profit, that you get. And make sure you only implement those changes to begin with so your teams see quick results. Communicate results to everyone so everyone can see the successes.

Keep A Rolling Change Programme

“Change is a constant” is a phrase we all hear. It may be a cliche but it’s also quite right. Therefore, any company needs to keep improving an aspect of their business all the time. Otherwise complacency sets in and competitors catch up or over take you. Your business profits drop and people start to scurry around desperate for sales and cost cutting. The focus becomes just one of survival and improvement falls by the wayside and with it the ability to continue to compete effectively.

Challenge Complacency

Your turnover may be the envy of your pals in your industry’s association or club. Think, what happens if a new start-up takes your business because they’re innovative, learn and adapt quickly and their customer service is amazing?

Never rest, never assume you’ve arrived at the pinnacle of business improvement. Any company I’ve walked into I’ve instantly seen, at least, 2 or 3 ways they could immediately improve what they’re doing. You should have the same view of your own company.