It’s easy to get caught up in the not-so-important details of your business. This shows up when business owners swear their e-mail box needs to be open at all times of the day. It also shows up when an employee swears that they needed to redesign a new fax cover sheet for the office. I mean, come on, the old cover sheets were ugly! Separating what’s important from what’s not important is essential in your business.
This Bible idiom of separating the wheat from the chaff is so appropriate in business. When your operation starts to grow, it’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of the day-to-day operations.
Keeping Your Business Focused
Keeping your business focused starts with having a vision of where you want to go and having a strong why for getting there.
When you have that in place, the key to keeping your business focused on high level performance is to set objectives and manage your business using these set of objectives as guideposts to moving towards the bigger vision.
Your objectives are the wheat of the business. They are the activities that produce income, develop new products, improve systems, etc.
Where Your Employees Fit In
When you have objectives set for your business you now have a tool for getting your entire team engaged in the goals of your business. You can now take your objectives and plug employees into them and use that to direct what they do on a day-to-basis.
A lot of my clients ask about how to set up performance reviews and how to measure the performance of their team. When you have objectives set and you have your team plugged into these objectives, you now have a set of criteria with which to rate your employees on.
This keep your team focused on producing the wheat of your business and not worrying about the chaff. Chaff is the casing that grains are found in. They are inedible to humans and thus worthless. You can feed it to animals so it does serve a function at some level. This is similar to many activities that we engage in. Things like e-mail, social media and meetings. They serve some secondary functions of your business but they should never be the focus
A new year is approaching and it’s time to set the direction that your business will travel for that year. How can you implement objectives into your business effectively? Will your business be focused on producing wheat or will it be preoccupied with the chaff?
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