Over the last few weeks, I re-visited a book I first read around 5 years ago on Essentialism by Greg McKeown (check it out here).
The concept of the disciplined pursuit of less was calling me because, like most business environments, there is always several things pulling and pushing my focus in different directions and I sometimes feel that there is a risk that I am not doing what is really important right now.
The book got me rethinking about the power of distraction – especially when it comes to effectively running a business. It forced me to ask myself – am I focusing on the right things? Am I making the right decisions and what do I have in place to rely more on process and not on people’s individual understanding of what they think needs to be done?
When looking at the bigger picture and seeing what really matters, resisting what McKeown calls the siren song of distraction enables you to keep your eyes peeled for the headlines and distinguishing from what he calls the trivial many from the vital few activities that are most valuable to achieve.
In my experience, better governance practices enable you to see what really matters and cut through the rest, enabling you to go big on the right stuff because it sheds light on the things that really matter.
Governance practices do this by providing a more defined, transparent and systematic approach to many aspects of your business – for example, by drawing and defining lines for decision making, people in roles in your business are clear on who can decide on what, and what they can decide and at which level.
In fact, I have personally found that setting clear boundaries is quite liberating and setting the rules in advance eliminates the need for any misdirection of activity or effort as well as the need to intervene at the last moment and say no.
Better governance also means that you have the delivery of your defined business strategy converted into business plans that are tracked, monitored and reported on, to make sure that focus is on KPIs that really matter with a team that are all singing from the same song-sheet because they understand, own and demonstrate the company’s defined values and behaviours.
Governance is all about defining and implementing processes and frameworks for how your business manages the critical activities, including how it manages risk, delivers to your customers and other activities by defining the patterns of action that need to occur by people in your business to deliver your defined outcomes.
Regardless of what stage in the business life cycle your business is at, in my view, better governance practices enable ‘the essential activities’ as the default activities, making execution of what really needs to be done effortless.
As a business leader you want your business to move towards your goals knowing that you have the right governance support structure in place. You want to feel secure knowing that the right risks are being effectively managed, the right things are being done and that you have a professional, capable and responsible team that understand the inherent benefits and principles of governance and are able to deal with the realities of it.
We build the bridge between governance theory and realities of applying good governance in businesses like yours at any stage of maturity.
So if you would like some more info on where your business is from a governance maturity standpoint undertake an obligation free self-assessment and discovery session here, and/or if you would like a hand with implementing better governance practices in your business contact us via the form below or call us on 0418218157.
