FountainBlue's June 3 Front Line Managers Online program was on the topic of 'The Need for Speed'. Please join me in thanking our panelists. Below are notes from the conversation.
Our panelists spoke eloquently about why there is so much pressure to do so many things with efficiency and with excellence. The financial, customer, business, community, operational and other pressures are immense, yet we must accept that these pressures are prevalent and choose how to proactively respond to these pressures. Below are some best practices suggested by our esteemed speakers.
Be Leader-ly
Build relationships of trust through ongoing, transparent and clear communications, collaborating to mitigate risks and to deliver on milestones and results.
Modify and moderate expectations and collaborate with others to deliver results which meet timeline and quality standards.
Create a culture of agility and growth where everyone supports each other in proactively managing the pressure around delivering excellence.
Connect disparate groups and teams and have them brainstorm new ways of doing things more collaboratively and more efficiently, sharing best practices, and creating new shared processes.
Consciously choose to go slowly, so that you can move quickly with more accuracy.
Challenge everyone to take an active role in managing their own operations and processes.
Thread information across people, managers and groups so that you can present a collective picture of how things are working, and make proposals on how things can work more efficiently.
Be Strategic
Focus on doing the most important things first - serving the most important people, completing the most high-impact projects with the greatest returns, etc., Once those foundational pieces are put in, there may be more to add other important things as well.
Accept that some things can't be changed and focus on making changes where you can, to ensure your team can efficiently and effectively respond to new requirements and needs.
Be customer-focused and design and deliver to the requirements of those customers.
Make the people, process and technology changes necessary to help the team move with agility and speed.
Be Innovative
Learn to try new things, fail fast, pivot quickly, and continue to learn how to do things better and faster.
Adopt the features not so much for their innovative value, but more for the value shown.
The bottom line is that in tech and in business, there's a need for everyone to perform with speed. But if you work with great teams and leaders, you can embrace this truth, and be more efficient and more effective while also being more productive and more balanced.