IMPLEMENT YOUR TRAINING Develop an operating system to help your team with implementation of ideas from seminars and conferences.
BY PETE DANIELSON
H
ave you ever attended a seminar or conference, took several pages of notes with great ideas and had good intentions of coming back to your business and making big changes — changes that will impact your life and your business forever — only to have nothing happen? I have. Have you ever sent one of your managers to a training seminar and saw no improvement, no changes and no shift in strategy? Me too. Have you ever discussed great ideas in your weekly team meetings and none of those ideas ever seems to be implemented? Have you ever felt like signing someone up for successful training was the end of the task on your part? Me too. Sending your team to training is only the beginning. If you don’t have an implementation process, nothing will change. I’ve become good at goal setting, staying focused and achieving what I set my mind to. Many of you can relate to that. I bet you’re all are pretty good at getting “your individual goal” achieved. Over the years, I learned how to change my own behavior to meet a goal. The challenge, for me, was
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HVACR BUSINESS JULY 2021
If you and your team can become great at implementation, you’re going to achieve your goals, have happier employees, be less stressed and you’re going to have an operating system for your business. to have the ability to change behaviors in other people. Often, in many other people. This is difficult, and there didn’t seem to be much help. It’s not an information problem — it’s an implementation problem. I had lunch with a colleague and told him I was in the process of putting together a presentation on implementation. He said, “that’s just what everyone needs. They don’t know how to start the process. The implementation or execution is where we need help.” Recently, I watched a video that was supposed to be a lesson on execution. Unfortunately, the whole video was on why it’s important, but it never mentioned a word about how to do it. If you and your team can become great at implementation, you’re going to achieve
your goals, have happier employees, be less stressed and you’re going to have an operating system for your business. Yes, an operating system that will have your team engaged at the highest level and say, “Game on; let’s do this!” For the past five years I’ve been studying implementation. I’ve worked with dozens of companies to help them create a process for implementation and accountability. Here is a four-step process to get your team engaged and achieve the most important goals in your company.
FOCUS ON GOALS, OBJECTIVES Sean Covey in “Four Disciplines of Execution” calls them your Wildly Important Goal (WIG). In Jim Collins book, “Good to Great” they call it a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG).
Regardless of what you call it, focusing on the goal is key. You must focus on less to do more. Steve Jobs said the hardest thing to do in business is to simplify and focus. Gino Wickman, the creator of entrepreneurial operating system (EOS), conducted a recent survey that found: • If you have 1-3 goals, then only two are completed; • If you have 4-9 goals, then only one is completed; • And if have 10 or more goals, then zero are completed. This is difficult. Most business leaders are smart, motivated individuals and they want to manage all aspects of their business well. I don’t want to suggest that you ignore important parts of your business. If I could make an analogy, it would be this: Air traffic controllers have many priorities and they must pay attention to a lot of moving parts/planes — but they focus on the ones landing. Meet with your team and discuss ideas and how to set the goals and the milestones to meet them. Get their feedback. Get their buy in. They will appreciate that and
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