Companies look to thrive and grow. In preparation, leaders work with their teams to identify the bottlenecks, roadblocks, and/or weaknesses that will keep the company from exploding with success.
We start by asking “Why” five times to arrive at the root of the bottleneck. From there, it’s time to dedicate resources to put things back into motion and proper flow.
Option One: Exploit the weakness.
The more expensive option, when you exploit a weakness, you’re adding additional resources to strengthen the flow. This may mean adding more salespeople to the department, renting new office space for an overcrowded assembly line, or securing additional loans or funding to spend on marketing or advertising. The goal here is to grow the resources of the organization to only address the bottleneck.
Examples include adding an additional customer service representative to work a high call volume or adding an additional assembly line shift to keep production machines running 24 hours.
Option Two: Elevate the weakness.
When we elevate a weakness, we’re investing and improving the quality of existing resources. In most cases, this is the more affordable solution with long-lasting benefits. There’s no question. Creating additional productivity out of existing resources will always result in larger growth over time.
This can be accomplished through training and education, process re-engineering, and/or a shift in the company budget. Instead of adding new salespeople, you can educate and elevate the skill set of your existing team. By upgrading equipment, you can increase production without adding additional personnel and energy costs of a new 24-hour production shift.
The last resort is to eliminate resources and reduce the company footprint.
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