Effective Personal Organisation

Are you a victim of your own work environment? Are you confronted daily with an overwhelming amount of work that seems to keep you racing to stay on track much less get ahead? Are you always losing things, redoing work you can’t find, doing the wrong work or failing to meet your organisational project deadlines? Do you constantly feel like you are under pressure even before you get to work because you know exactly how the day is going to unravel?
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Efficiency vs Effectiveness

The psychologist and author Abraham Maslow once wrote, “You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.” Organisations and the individuals who are participants at all levels are often defined by their ability to embrace the future in pursuit of established goals. It comes down to an organisation that is merely efficient and able to achieve results with precision, but not necessarily adaptability, or one that is effective and can embrace a changing future for the health of the organisation.

In its simplest terms, being efficient means having internal and external processes that lead to the desired end result. Efficiency refers to having the means to produce the desired effects. For example, a sales team may have a weekly sales goal and it is met 90% of the time. The team is considered to be efficient in that the desired amount of sales is produced with the least amount of waste or overtime.

An Adaptable Organisation

But is being able to meet a weekly sales goal an indication of an effective sales team? Could the goal or the sales figures be higher? Effectiveness in an organisation is doing the right things which leads to an adaptable environment capable of competing in the future. An effective sales team does not just meet sales goals without question. An effective sales team will manage relationships with people and organisations that can prove to be the foundation for new business in the future. The effective sales team can create a viable customer base that includes high rates of retention and customer satisfaction.

An efficient sales team meets its goals, but what if the goals change or are expanded? How easily can the sales persons adapt to the new environment? If new products are introduced, how quickly can the team use established customer relationships to jumpstart sales?

Instead of just focusing on making sales efficiently, the sales team should also be constantly evaluating each of its actions and procedures looking for ways the organisation can be more adaptable, cost efficient, productive, innovative and customer oriented.

Effectiveness and Quality

The concepts of efficiency and effectiveness are important for every organisation because they go right to the heart of output and quality. An organisation that is efficient is able to achieve its goals, but there is not necessarily a relationship to quality. You can sell 50 widgets in a week, but is the customer satisfied and willing to repurchase the widgets next week? Or is the method of salesmanship and the quality of the widget so low that it is a one-time sale?

Efficiency and effectiveness are applicable to all organisational functions including management or leadership, team building and employee performance, sales, production, innovation, and all internal processes including those in the business office. For example, an efficient accounts payable department pays company bills on time. An effective accounts payable department has a system in place which enables the company to take advantage of discounts for early payment and is able to integrate payment information with purchasing data in order to insure the least cost is incurred at all times. It is accounts payable that often becomes the information source for trending prices.

More Than What is Expected

There is another way to look at efficiency and effectiveness. An efficient organisation or process will perform as expected and operates in the short term. An effective organisation asks if the performance meets the mission of the organisation and contributes to long term success and sustainability. An efficient organisation spends the expected amount of money to produce results. An effective organisation measures whether the money spent improved its ability to meet future goals.

An efficient organisation can produce immediate results by relying on “safety” in the words of Maslow. The facts and figures supporting the efficient production of output are safe. The effective organisation looks beyond the facts and figures and builds a quality organisation that is prepared for future growth. An organisation should be both efficient and effective, but if there had to be a choice made between the two…effectiveness is more important.

In short efficiency is about doing things right, whereas effectiveness is about doing the right things!

Creating Positive First Impressions

Are you moving into a new role within your business? Maybe you are moving companies altogether and you are about to meet a whole new team for the first time?

No matter what the situation that all important first impression is crucial if you want to get off on the right foot.

Most of the time, you will get an opportunity to introduce yourself to each individual team member, as well as to the whole group. And indeed it can be a good idea to meet with everyone in this way before getting stuck into your own role proper.

One of the most upsetting things about getting a new manager or senior member of staff when an old one leaves is that it can totally change the way things have been working. It’s akin to having a stranger walk into your own home and start changing things without asking. There is no doubt that you as the senior person are in charge, but there are ways and means of doing things.

Creating a positive first impression can be done so easily by letting your team know you are open to input and suggestions at all times. Many employees are understandably wary when new management comes in. Most people are wary of change and if that change could be negative in nature then they may end up feeling worried about what the future in their job could be like.

It is also a good idea to find out what kind of team or sales training has been given up until this point. By discovering what your team already knows and does you can move forward with more confidence and knowledge.

It is perhaps understandable that any new manager or leader wants to make their own mark. But if you go straight in and try to do this without taking the time to see how things are done to begin with, you could end up making a dreadful first impression.

Most people in similar positions will tell you that connecting with your team is probably the most important thing to do right off the bat. And you only get one chance at this – if you get it wrong then your job will be made so much harder, as you will be trying to convince your team that you are capable of doing a great job yourself.

That’s why it can pay dividends to allocate plenty of time to see how the team works before you make any alterations to how things are done. Make the time to get to know people and see how they work. You never know, they might already have great ideas for doing things that you may not have thought of! And if that is the case you would only be making more work for yourself by charging in and doing what you wanted from the start.

Having spent time getting to know your team, you can then follow up with the communication of your expectations as a foundation for how you see the team working together. Remember that you are perhaps taking over from someone who had a very different leadership style to you, which can be confusing as the team makes the adjustment from one to the other. Anything you can do to help this process will be appreciated.

So get to work on that first impression. You only get one shot at it.

Prioritizing Tasks

Productivity is one of the key parts of becoming a successful leader. No matter what field you are in you need to make sure you can take on whatever tasks your role requires in the best possible way, if you are to succeed in driving your business forwards.

But getting things done is about much more than just tackling each task in turn. You need to be able to assess those tasks to ensure you tackle them in the right order, otherwise you run the risk of failing to meet an important deadline.

It’s clear then that you need some kind of strategy to make sure you prioritize everything effectively, enabling you to work to the best of your ability while also fending off stress. This can often arise in people with a lack of discipline and logic; if you deal with things in a haphazard way then you run the risk of forgetting an important task or completing it late, which adds to your stress levels and can jeopardize your position. If you feel you need assistance in developing this skill, consider whether additional management training would be of help.

The key to sorting out your priorities is to make a list of all the things that need doing. This step alone helps to clear your head and gets your thoughts down on paper, making them concrete instead of vague. Once it is written down it is very hard to forget something.

By assessing tasks in terms of urgency and importance you can decide which tasks to “bin”, which to delegate to be done by someone else or perhaps even to say no to. This will then leave the ones to be attended to by you and to be focused on in order of urgency.

In identifying the tasks to focus on, try thinking in terms of “the next logical step”. Often tasks can become overpowering purely because we are looking at the task in totality instead of breaking it down into “bite sized pieces”.

By breaking tasks down into shorter term deadlines can also move them from the “to do” list to a diarised event

Divide the number of days you have available by the amount of work that is involved and make time on each day to do a specific amount towards that task.

You should also consider whether you will need any assistance from other team members to help you with meeting your priorities. If so you will need to brief them in plenty of time for them to get their part of the task done. This is an excellent team building exercise that everyone can learn from.

One other thing that is worth bearing in mind is that no plan for prioritizing tasks ever remains untouched. Just as you successfully complete a particular job you will find that something else comes along to take its place. In this situation you should review your list of priorities to see where the new task will fit into the overall picture.

Prioritizing your tasks is a constant effort. The more you do it the more experienced you will become in assigning various levels of importance to new work as it comes in, and you will become a better leader as a result, as others will see you implementing these methods and may start to use them themselves.

Putting Together Meaningful Reports

Reports can be a vital way of recording certain events or findings so that others can read them, and as such it is essential that you create a good structure to work to if you want to write the best report you possibly can.

So what makes a report meaningful? How can you be sure you are writing something that will be worthwhile to other people, who may not know or be aware of any of the circumstances which have led to the report being written in the first place?

Meaningful reports can be categorised as those which take various types of data from several sources. The person writing the report then evaluates it all and relates it to others by writing a report which draws all the different aspects of the subject together in a way which can be easily understood by anyone who reads it.

This can obviously be quite a complex process, which is why it’s worth sketching out a rough plan before you start writing, in order to make the actual writing process easier.

First of all, ask yourself what the purpose of the report is. Do you need to come to some kind of conclusion, or are you simply relating a certain chain of events? If you are reviewing an event or occurrence then you will need to gather all the data you have and organise it into its proper order before you start writing. You may need to separate out the positive from the negative and make notes on their effect on the business as a whole, for example.

Brevity is essential when it comes to the writing process itself, and this is where your groundwork will come in handy, as you will have organised a structure to stick to already, and marshalled all the information that needs to be included in its proper place. A meaningful report is not a long report; rather it is a report which takes the most important facts from all the material you have available and uses them to get your point across.

Bear in mind that when you finish writing your report, you have not finished it completely as yet. Editing is just as important as the writing if you want to create a meaningful report which stands up well to scrutiny. You can often strike out many unnecessary words during the editing process, and make what you have written already far clearer for the reader to understand and digest.

Pay attention to your structure on the page as well. Breaking your report up into easy to read chunks with suitable headings helps people to navigate through the report and makes it easier for you to write a meaningful report too, since you can concentrate on keeping the essential information in each section, rather than wandering off the point.

Finally you should always scan through your report to ensure you have not written anything in a vague or misleading manner. The point of any kind of report is to convey information in a solid and well presented way, so be sure to check through it and revise it several times before finishing.