A Personal Message

I'd like to explain some important aspects of our approach and I'd like to do this for two main reasons.

Firstly, being explicit about the way we work will help you make your decision to employ Profit Improvers - or not. This will save time. Secondly, in the explanation you may glean some advice that will help you and your organisation save a lot of time and money and avoid wasted effort.

1. Start at the "coal-face". To help organisations change we start at the "coal-face". We ask people in departments and teams what they need to do even better. This motivates people, they see the serious approach and they see some action! From this come suggestions for better training, better systems and better communication. It's from this bottom-up approach that senior managers learn, for example, that the appraisal system isn't working, that people want to know what the company's strategy is and their part in it and that the procedure recording the progress of each job from order-taking to delivery, is flawed.

The need for wider systems changes comes from the "coal-face". Consequently, we avoid the massive, top-down change programmes that result in fancy colour diagrams, quality circle meetings and new job titles. The literature is littered with case studies of failures and I know of three personally - one costing £2 million!

2. Work on may fronts at once. Real improvement comes from the cumulative effect of lots of 5% improvements. For example, a project might be to improve the safety record of an organisation - lessen the number of people being hurt each year. For the project to succeed, one has to work on leadership ability of supervisors, improving the quality of safety meetings, improving procedures and making safety literature have more impact, in addition to attempting attitude change through technical and behavioural workshops.

3. Look for cures. don't just treat the symptoms Many training courses only treat the symptoms. We send people on courses because we see something not being done as well as it could be. But what is causing the difficulty in the first place? To really help people and their organisations improve we must find what is hindering them and allow them to find solutions. Yes, tips on time management, team building and brilliant customer care, for example, are useful, but they won't work if the organisation albeit unintentionally, puts barriers in people's way. Profit Improvers works with people to fix the systems and cultures in which they have to operate.

4. Solutions are usually simple to conceive but may be boring and uncomfortable to carry out. The solutions to most people-problems are usually very straightforward. Some are so straightforward that many people don't believe it and they look for something more "thorough"! That's why consultants and management experts feel they have to keep coming up with new fads in which to package the same age-old principles.

Take leadership for example. The twelve or so basic principles of being an effective leader require neither great intellectual understanding nor large sums of money to apply. However, some managers, for whatever reason, find it difficult to simply: praise genuinely, ensure people have accurate job descriptions, talk to people on a regular basis about their jobs, find ways to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy and to communicate regularly on topics such as company progress and strategy.

Many change initiatives fail because some managers are not prepared to do the mundane and perhaps boring tasks required. No matter how expensive and grandly named and intellectually exciting a change programme is, it will in the end come down to doing certain basics. Profit Improvers works with managers to get them to accept this reality and to motivate them to follow-through. This leads to the next element in successful change.

5. Lasting benefit takes time. As with all interventions it is possible to get some quick results - and that's good. However, the real and lasting benefits can only come with time. For example, when a company installs a new appraisal system, maximum participation and involvement occurs only in the second or third year. This means that there has to be sustained action, follow-up and monitoring. Once we do a Performance Improvement Workshop we build in a follow-up six weeks later. We recommend that companies do performance workshops - even if facilitated by their own managers - twice a year.

Take leadership again. What good does it do to send someone on a 5-day leadership course? What chance do participants get to apply what they have learned on day one? People need time to try to apply what they learn because it's from application that the really important questions and learning come. Profit Improvers spreads its management training programmes over a few months.

6. Concentrate on HOW not what. After sixteen years of giving hundreds of workshops I have found that most people KNOW what they must do to be a good leader, to give a good presentation, to manage their time better, to write an effective report and so on. Their real problem is that they don't know HOW to do what they know they should. In Profit Improvers' workshops the theory, lecturing and slides are kept to an absolute minimum.

People want practical solutions to help them fix real workplace problems. In any workshop it is the participants who should be doing most of the talking and problem solving. The facilitator is there to guide the discussion and at times add additional advice from hard-earned experience. Lecturing, no matter how entertaining, does not change people's behaviours. People have to come to their own realisation of what is required and they do this by participating and having their views challenged. Your people don't need gurus, but experienced colleagues who can help them to see that they are, to a large extent, capable of solving their own problems.

7. Ignore the pseudo-science. We humans, as rational as we are, are still tempted to find the "magic wand" - the cure-all. There isn't one. That's why, in my experience, psychometric tests, hand writing analysis, 360 degree feedback questionnaires, psychological team profiling, and surveys with 90 questions to assess the relationship between managers and their workers and "what our customers think of us", are a waste of time, effort and money.

When recruiting someone, you know the difficulties the job presents, so find a way of testing candidates on their ability to cope. The principles of team working are the same for everybody no matter what their personality type. And we know now what we should be doing to impress our customers so why postpone doing it.

Of course research has its value but don't do it unless you have to. More seriously, to try and turn the results into numbers and pretend that they mean something is an attempt to avoid the straightforward but sometimes onerous works that has to be done to ensure success. The worst example is an appraisal scheme where you have to rate a subordinate on a scale of 1 to 5 on twenty criteria, and average the result. Statistically it's incorrect to do this, but what does it tell you in the end? The appraisee and appraiser often end up having 20 disagreements on whether "it should be a 4 or a 5".

Here's other examples. When recruiting someone, you know the difficulties the job presents, so find a way of testing candidates on their ability to cope. The principles of team working are the same for everybody so why try and find out their personality type? We already know now what we should be doing to impress our customers so why postpone doing it with a costly and time consuming exercise to "see what our customers think of us".

8. People learn more when they are relaxed and having fun. That's why all Profit Improvers workshops are informal and relaxed. There is no place for silly game playing that embarrasses people, or all-night sessions that put people under pressure to see if "they crack", or outdoor challenges which exposes people's incompetence and fear.

Summary.

I'm sure you already knew much of what you've just read - much of it is common sense. However, for some people our approach is unorthodox and simplistic. But the proof is in the eating. All that matters is getting the results you want. That's what Profit Improvers focuses on - not on showing you how clever we are.

All success!

Bill Robb, Managing Director, Profit Improvers Ltd.