Empowering focus
I’m on a mission to enable insights professionals to focus on their sweet spot. To stay in their flow. Get into their zone. To do more of the enjoyable elements of work and as a consequence be more productive and develop quicker.
I’m passionate about this as I’ve sat in countless weekly meetings discussing the pressures of high and variable workloads while operating in an ever changing environment (COVID was certainly a character building time!). Balancing these challenges with the need to remain not only profitable, but stay in business for the long term requires creativity at times.
Company culture
Despite scaling the business year, after year, a good company culture and high staff retention rate has always been dear to my heart. Achieving high staff engagement levels has felt like a badge of honor, and I’ve always been very grateful for my team.
I’ve always been keen to foster the specialisms of staff, rather than putting the pressure of having to be an excellent all rounder on them as they rise through the ranks. ‘T shaped’ individuals, those that can turn their hand to anything, are of course invaluable to a small business as it has to hustle while growing. But it can sometimes hold back the personal growth of the individual, as it’s hard to identify their successor and let go of ‘day one’ tasks.
Established management principle
Specialising isn’t anything new. In 1911 Fredrick Wilson Taylor published “The Principles of Scientific Management.” In this, he proposed that by optimizing and simplifying jobs, productivity would increase. Simplifying, rather than making them more complex as a person gains experience. Exactly what Sean Frank talked about in helping him achieve his goal of $1 billion.
Taylor also believed that making people work as hard as they could was not as efficient as optimizing the way the work was done. Do you count yourself guilty of that?
Mckinsey & Co’s 10 year study found that executives are 5x more productive if they can get into their flow
More recently, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with Mckinsey & Co. did a 10 year study finding that executives are 5x more productive if they can get into their flow. For knowledge workers such as market research professionals, reducing the need to multitask can reduce errors and facilitate deeper thinking, reflection and consequently more actionable insights.
Achieving it
So how do you get to those heady heights of 5x improvement in productivity? Well one part of your journey has to be understanding your staff’s strengths and weaknesses, but perhaps more importantly their preferences. I.e. identifying their sweet spot.
Fortunately, a friend of mine, entrepreneur and executive Coach Andy Clayton has developed a methodology and written an accompanying book. “Sweetspot: How to Spend More Time Doing What You Love, Are Great At, and Adds Most Value”.
I’ll tell you more about how you can identify their sweet spots in my next post. For now I just wanted to explain why I’ve created Part of the . Team providing MR relevant support for essential but mundane tasks enabling you to spread the workload cost effectively.
