I want to let you in on a business coaching secret–simple scorecards not only give you meaningful feedback, but more importantly, they automatically focus your attention on those fewer, better things that make a difference in your business.
How does this impact you as you scale your company? Simple, in order to scale your business you need a rock-solid base in all the five core pillars of your company:Sales/Marketing; Operations; HR; Executive Leadership; and Finance.
One way to do that is to have a clear structure to help you evaluate how you’re doing in each pillar, and to guide you to incrementally improve pillar by pillar as you grow.
In this article I’m focusing on your Leadership Pillar (I’ve addressed the other pillars of your company in other articles.)
Here is a simple scorecard that you can use each quarterly to make sure you’re continuously improving your “Leadership Pillar”.
Each quarter, rate your company on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being best) on each of the following six aspects of your Leadership Pillar:
- Team Member Clarity on Big Picture: Does each member of your team have a clear understanding of your company’s mission and values? Do they understand how to connect their daily functions with your mission and values? Do they each have a clear understanding of the big picture company goals? And how the work they do contributes to those goals? On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Leadership Pillar in this area?
- Your Current Business Strategy: How do you marshal your resources of time, money, attention, etc. to reach your big picture company goals? Is this an intentional strategy or an improvisation? Or just inertia? Have you validated your current business strategy or do you simply hope it will be effective? On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Leadership Pillar in this area?
- Review Process for Company Performance, Strategy, and Plan of Action: Do you have a regular and reliable process for strategic reviews? Do you meet quarterly to regroup and craft your coming quarter’s written plan of action? On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Leadership Pillar in this area?
- Troubleshooting of Major Challenges As Needed: How well does your leadership team handle the “out of the blue” emergencies that inevitably come up in business? On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Leadership Pillar in this area?
- Leadership Development: How well does your company do at developing future leaders internally? Is this a consistently followed process or a sporadic and ad hoc accident? On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Leadership Pillar in this area?
- Company Culture and Tradition: Has your company intentionally cultivated a palpable company culture? How well do you do on the whole reinforcing and living that culture day in, day out across your entire team? On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Leadership Pillar in this area?
Now that you’ve rated your company’s Leadership Pillar on these 6 key sub-functions, what key insights jumped out at you?
Which ONE sub-function would most benefit your company to focus on improving over the next 90 days.
Then ask yourself, what three simple steps could you take this quarter to improve your score in this one sub-function by 1-2 points or more.
By breaking things down into bite sized chunks and doing this each quarter you’ll be amazed at the compounded growth your business will enjoy over the next few years.
Also, to help you grow your business and get your life back, we just put the finishing touches on a powerful free toolkit which includes 21 in-depth video trainings on how to intelligently scale your company. To access this free toolkit click here. Enjoy.