Is familiarity a source of comfort or the bane of your existence? The reality is that comfort often leads to bane. Business leaders opting for the comfort of familiarity, later find themselves trying to catch up to others in the industry. Let’s explore how this happens.
Comfort ➠ Complacency
Comfort leads to complacency. which, to me, is the earliest stage of decline. In complacency we stop moving forward while others continue to improve what they’re doing…the result they and their customers are getting.
I avoid complacency by reminding myself that I’ve never seen perfection, so there must be a better way.
Bane
An even more insidious way that familiarity prevents progress can be seen in the following example.
Example
A manufacturing operation hired me as a fractional CFO. I begin every engagement with what I call a walk-through of the business. I want to know how they market, sell, produce, deliver and what paperwork is involved.
During the walk-through the CEO explained that requests for proposal (RFPs) went to the estimating department which created bids. When the contract came in, the contract went to the engineering department where a manufacturing plan was created.
I asked the CEO, where in the process the plan that the estimators used to bid the job was compared to the manufacturing plan the engineering group created. His response was: “If I understand what you’re saying, and frankly I think you’re being polite, is that we could bid a job one way and manufacture it in a completely different way.” When I acknowledge that this was my point, he said “We’ve been doing that for 15 years.”
Fifteen years of inefficiency resulting from familiarity…from challenging what was being done in order to discover a better way of doing things.
Takeaway
If you’re not regularly challenging what’s working, trying to find a better way to do what you’re doing, you’re enabling familiarity to limit both your current and future success. Another way to look at it is that you’re positioning your company to have to play catch up…an unenviable, if not potentially devastating, position for your company to be in.
At least once a month, explore the efficacy of what you’re doing in some aspect of your business. Pursue the task with a mindset of “What am I going to learn? How will it help me move my company forward more quickly?”
You’ll not only see opportunities for improvement, you’ll uncover and resolve problems you didn’t know existed…like that of the manufacturing client in the example above.
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If you’d like the leaders in your organization to learn how to use the numbers more effectively and dramatically improve the productivity of your workforce, contact me to learn more about these resources:
Resources
Making the EXCEPTIONAL Normal program helps you identify and nurture emerging leaders who elevate all around them to higher levels of performance and greater job enjoyment.
Financial Awareness & Strategy program where employees learn to identify opportunities to improve financial results and prioritize these opportunities on the basis of which produces the greatest impact with the least effort. Greater financial awareness = Better decisions.
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