Have you ever asked yourself, “Why am I getting a salary?” This is a key question any business owner needs to ask himself or herself constantly. Am I getting paid for my expertise or for doing my books, admin work, online marketing, writing my blogs, etc?
If you’re not crystal clear on why you are getting paid and what results your company expects of you, what you need to accomplish on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, it is very hard for you to perform at your best. In other words, you started your business for a reason and in order for it to be successful you need to get specific results. You’re getting financially rewarded for performing specific tasks and quite often the financial rewards are tied to the quality and quantity of the work you do. Combined with the work of your employees or team members you create a product or service customers are willing to pay for.
Your job can be broken up in to 5-7 key result areas. These areas represent the results you absolutely, positively have to get to fulfill your responsibilities and make your maximum contribution to your business. As such, it is critical that you focus on these key areas. It is defined as something for which you are completely responsible, if you don’t do it, it won’t get done. It is an activity that is under your control. It is critically important to the work of your employees and team members. Failure to perform these activities could ruin your business.
Let’s compare this with our body: our blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate and brain-wave-activity are vital functions. The absence of any of these functions leads to the death of an organism. So, if I, as a business owner fail to perform any of the critical result areas it can lead to the failure of my business.
The Big 7 key result areas in Management and Sales are: planning, organizing, staffing, delegating, supervising, measuring and reporting key results of sales people: prospecting, building rapport and trust, identifying needs, presenting persuasively, answering objections, closing the sale and getting resales and referrals.
Yes, as you can see, we once again go back to CLARITY and how critical it is. Let me explain: High performers clearly know their key result areas. What does this mean for you as a business owner? All your employees and team members MUST be able to clearly identify their key result areas AND communicate them with others in the company. If everybody in the organization clearly understands everyone’s key result areas and responsibilities the productivity will skyrocket.
Hopefully, by now your wheels are turning and you’re making a mental list of your key result areas. 2 that come to mind right away are: hiring the right people and effectively DELEGATING. I suggest you pause here and make your list. Once you’re done listing your key result areas, I recommend you grade yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest.
Grade yourself in each of these areas: Where are you strong? Where are you week? Where are you getting excellent results and where are you underperforming?
Rule: Your weakest key result area sets the height at which you can use all your other skills and abilities! In other words: You could be exceptional in 6 out of 7 key result areas, but poor performance in the 7th will hold you back and determine how much you achieve with all your other skills. What does this mean? This weakness will be a constant drag and source of frustration and friction.
Poor performance often leads to procrastination, as such, it is critical for everyone on your team to improve, get better, that’s one of the 6 in my business name Balance 6 is self-improvement because: the better you become at a particular skill, the more motivated you’ll be to perform that skill and the less likely to procrastinate on it. To give you an example: I mentioned delegating being a key result area for business owners. This skill is the key to getting results through others. A business owner who cannot delegate properly will be held back from using all of his or her other skills at the maximum levels of effectiveness. As you can see, poor delegation can lead to poor business performance, stagnation and lack of growth. Once you have clarity on this, you can look for ways to improve.
What can you do to improve your underperforming key areas? We all have strengths and weaknesses, no need to justify or defend our weaknesses. Identify them clearly! Then make a plan on how to get better at it. One of the greatest questions you can ask is: “What one skill, if developed and done in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my business?” Start working on improving this skill! The good news is that all business skills are learnable. One of the best and fastest ways to stop procrastination and get more done faster is to become absolutely excellent at your key result areas.