No one knows your business better than you and your team. Together, you know the best way to work and how the organization is most successful. Or...at least you think you know. What can help is to take a look at how the competition is doing it. An outside fresh perspective on your organization can also be valuable. And how do you implement those changes and improvements in your organization? Do you impose that on your people or do you help them do that?
Learning from the competition
No two identical companies can be found, so in that respect the organization you work for is also unique. But of course, there are companies struggling with the exact same challenges as you. Often these are your competitors and/or industry peers. As far as possible, immerse yourself in their way of working. What do their processes look like? What automation do they use? What is the company structure like? In what areas do they score better than you and why is this? It doesn't mean you should blindly copy what the competition is doing. Learn from the competition, see what the best practices are in your industry and translate this into workable solutions for your organization.
"You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die."
Jack Ma - founder Alibaba Group
An outside view
As a business owner, you are busy. Daily operations take up a lot of your time, leaving you with less time to work on improving your business. In that case, a fresh outside perspective can help you. Someone who looks at your situation independently, helps you make the right choices and ensures that you start working more successfully. Especially when you have been working in an organization for a long time, you can get stuck in certain thinking patterns and fail to think out-of-the-box. The vision of someone from the outside can then be enlightening.
Change must be managed
How you handle change in your organization is crucial to the success you achieve with it. Do you push through a new way of working despite resistance? Do you introduce new regulations without consultation? The chances of success are slim. You have to manage change. Inform your colleagues in time, ask them for feedback, let them participate in the decision-making process where possible, check whether there is support for your measures, explain why you are introducing something, help them get used to the change and make adjustments where necessary. In this way you increase the chance of acceptance and thus the success of the change.
Just keep being yourself!
Watching the competition and listening to others is helpful, but stay true to yourself. It is often the creativity, stubbornness or perseverance of one or more people in the organization that has created and will create success. Be open to outside noises, but do assume your own strengths!
Philip van Kemenade is marketing manager at Dysel and has daily contact with end users of software.
