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Winning a yacht race is about making decisions and executing quickly. Winning the season is a combination of strong tactic execution and maintaining and improving your performance capability. The same is true of business operations, here’s how you can ensure you and your team keep winning.
My dad has been sailing since he could stand up. Every Sunday, growing up, he and my brother and sister would race under the bridges on the Forth, at Queensferry. They would review their performance over the Sunday roast, my mum and I had prepared while they were out. I didn’t understand a lot of what was being said but do clearly recall dad would often declare “the second-best decision wins the race”.
It took me years to finally understand what he meant.
The rules of yacht racing are complicated, and you are always at the mercy of how the wind blows. Yachts are given handicaps based on the boat’s expected performance so the position in the race is attributable to the crew’s skills. The decisions the crew makes and executing them quickly makes the difference. Dad advocated it is better to decide and execute quickly, even if it’s only the second-best idea you land on. In contrast, if you agonise over finding the very best idea, you waste valuable time.
When you’re at sea, the winning strategy is making decisions quickly.
Around the dinner table, they were in port.
This was the time for assessing their strategies and considering other options. My sister would say ‘If we’d tacked up earlier on the second mark we could have taken that blue boat’; ‘yeah but if we waited longer we could have caught their wind and forced them to change tacks around the fourth’ my brother would counter. I admit I was a little jealous of their strategizing and the excitement they all shared. But then again, I do cook a mean roast thanks to the Sunday lessons from my mother.
You’re:
At sea you need your team to be as productive as possible.
You're:
In port you’re strategizing and working out how you can continue to do more with less. You are optimising your efficiency and effectiveness.
It’s about balancing efficiency, achieving more with less and productivity producing output effectively. It’s having a plan and efficient system for doing things and when it matters, focusing to get them done.
Poor efficiency and productivity waste money, fact.
The Manufacturer reports that small and medium businesses lose 5.6% of business time per year or £40bn of economic value for the UK due to poor productivity. Over 20% of business revenue is lost due to inefficiencies, according to a study by the IDC. Ineffective operations also affect quality; missed deadlines, errors, incorrect orders and returns are all bad news for business.
As the axiom goes a happy worker is a productive worker. The opposite is also true, no one likes redoing work or feeling frustrated by poor processes. Blame cultures often develop because of suboptimal operations which leads to frustration and bad morale.
So how can we ensure our operations are optimised?
When you’re at sea it’s about getting it done. Focusing on the task at hand gets stuff done.
Here are some areas you can look at before you set sail.
It takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to recover from a distraction, according to a study by the University of California. Multiply that by all your staff and every distraction they face.... that's a lot of time wasted. There are unavoidable distractions in every workplace but also actions you can take to minimise them for you and your staff.
13 days a year are wasted in unnecessary meetings per employee, as reported in the Independent. Are all of your meetings necessary? According to a study by Harvard Business Review of 182 senior managers 65% said meetings keep them from completing work. Your staff will thank you for eliminating any that don’t add value. Pare down the attendee list and make sure there is a clear agenda and purpose to each meeting.
In primary school our teacher reserved 20 minutes a day for ‘ERNI’. This stood for ‘everyone reading nobody interrupting’. ERNI is probably a bad idea, except maybe for research staff, but could you try EFNI? Everyone focusing nobody interrupting.
Reserving time for quiet hours, or ‘no internal messaging’ hours will allow people time to focus and boost through their work.
Social media can be the antithesis of productivity, yet sometimes irresistible. Cold Turkey is one of many apps you can download for free to block certain sites on a scheduled or timer basis. I also clearly remember the day that I discovered that the Outlook email pop up alert could be switched off, bliss. Gmail has it too, of course.
I love a ‘to do’ list. It is a wonderful thing and avoids making decisions when you are trying to focus on action. You don’t need to engage in decision making; as you complete each task, take the pleasure of crossing off that item and move onto the next.
A ‘to do’ list could also become a ‘to achieve’ list. Encouraging staff to write down what they will achieve during ERFI time will increase their likelihood of them achieving them by 1.2 to 1.4 times. The act of writing tasks out forces clarity. Specifically saying 'I will complete a first draft of the second-best decision wins the race article' is more likely to be achieved than ‘writing time’. Writing and reading our goals also helps us envision what we plan on doing.
Ever find that the day before you jet off for a 2-week holiday, you’re incredibly productive? Certainly, for me, the desire to have a stress-free break and not return to a piled-up mess spurs me on to get stuff done. As Parkinson’s law states ‘work expands to fill the time available’. Deadlines give you a sense of focus and fast track decisions.
‘Done is better than perfect’, as Sheryl Sandberg notes in her book Lean In. ‘Done’ gets results and striving for perfection can cause paralysis or in my dad’s case to lose the race.
I’ve had only one golf lesson in my life, I wasn’t very good. The trainer, Mark, was very patient me and gave me one piece of advice that has stuck in my mind and aided me in so many areas. ‘Imagine there is a large circle drawn around the hole’ he said, ‘aim to land your ball within that circle, we can take more shots to sink it’.
It’s too easy to agonise over decisions and strive for perfection. Take an action that moves you closer and course correct if you need to.
My sister in law, a interpreter, swears by the Pomodoro Technique. Developed by Francesco Cirillo the Pomodoro Technique (tomato in Italian) is named after the classic tomato shaped kitchen timer. The technique is to set a timer for 25 minutes to work on a task, once the buzzer sounds put a check mark on a piece of paper and take a 3-5 minute break. Once you have collected 4 ‘tomatoes’ you can take a longer break (15-30 minutes) and reset your marks to zero.
Sometimes sign off procedures are necessary for a multitude of reasons. Seeking sign off can be frustrating; as a junior I learned arriving at the boss’s office at 5 past the hour gave me the best shot at catching her between meetings. If someone has to sign off decisions for staff to move forward, make sure they are aware and available or duplicate those that can give the go ahead or create a system where sign off are given in bulk.
Your ship would sink if you never went into port to maintain it. People can’t go full speed all the time and circumstances change, making processes and procedures no longer optimal.
‘That’s the way we’ve always done it’, as the saying goes, is the most dangerous phrase in business. You need to reserve time to be in port, to review, evaluate and improve. Your operations will only stay effective if they are constantly reviewed for the ever-changing environment.
If you implement EFNI time review anything that slowed your staff down and do something about it. You could do this as a group to allow staff to share best practices or anonymously if you suspect that staff will blame others. Sometimes people don’t know they are tapping their feet and it’s infuriating to others.
Staff members will have solved smaller productivity problems for themselves and can share this information with others if you create the forum for them to do so.
Processes are a series of actions taken to achieve an objective. The end goal may change, or the value of the actions might change. Laying out core processes step by step and reviewing them for duplication, bottlenecks and redundant steps can save valuable time.
Silos are also a common problem, understanding what other departments are doing and how they use your part of the process can reveal many process improvement opportunities.
A bias for action means that taking action is your default state. It’s great to say that the second best decision wins the race but if your team can’t assess whether their decision is even close to the best decision they’ll be stuck. Ensuring that everyone is on the same page in terms of why we do things and our preferred methodology can create a bias for action.
97% believe a lack of alignment within a team directly impacts the outcome of a task or project, according to a study by Salesforce of more than 1400 corporate executives, employees and educators.
Team members need to understand the overall priorities for a company and the goals to make decisions in the right direction. If people understand the end goal they are more likely to make an educated guess about what to do at sea.
Agreeing what you stand for and telling stories that reinforce those principals help employees understand what decisions they should take.
I worked for a company that held events for its members. 'We always say yes' the meetings team told us. They would recite a story of how a client once asked for dry cleaning to be picked up for his wife and the how the request was promptly fulfilled. During an event, a member asked me for a specific brand of water and some paracetamol, I had no hesitation in leaving the office and heading to the nearest supermarket. 'We always say yes’; I knew exactly what decision to take without hesitation.
A failure is only really a failure if you don’t take the opportunity to learn. Take a post-mortem openly and honestly when something goes wrong to garner understanding amongst the team. A culture that accepts mistakes will allow team members to feel empowered to make decisions rather than stand still.
A study by Towers Perrin showed that companies with highly engaged employees earned 19.2% more operating income than their baseline peers. Engaging your team in strategic planning and crafting the company culture will drive better decision making and stronger outcomes.
My brother, sister and dad often won the season despite an average age of about 25 between the three of them. Most of their competitors had 25 years’ experience each.
Win your season time and time again by making sure you have both elements of effective operations in place. Set sail with a confident crew and a ship shape vessel.
If you have any questions or would like to share your success stories I'd love to hear from you, please do get in touch using the buttons above.
Bon voyage!
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