Creating a High Octane Culture - Part 7

Does your company need an alignment?

When your car needs one, it means that both wheels are not moving in exactly the same direction. Therefore your car has a difficult time moving forward.

Maybe your company is having a difficult time moving forward?

Thanks to Les Rubenovitch, a trainer I brought in, we executed some incredible habits that keep Next Step aligned.

Here's what we do.

Have a quarterly theme.
Instead of everyone focused on different initiatives at the same time, we're all focused on one per quarter. It is publicly displayed (see our foot-o-meter above). This quarter, our theme was cash in during the summer. Summer is usually a slow cash flow time for us, so we created a new system of billing that gets the cash in sooner.

Reward
Set a big celebration when you reach the goal. There’s nothing like have something exciting to rally around.

Daily Huddles
Everyone in the company should be in a daily huddle. A huddle should last no more than 10 minutes. In the huddle, people report what's up for the day, any places their stuck and a daily metric that they are in charge of for the company. At Next Step, we start with a manager huddle, then each manager huddles with his/her reports. This way, info cascades through the whole company, every day - therefore creating daily alignment! You’re probably saying that there is no way you have time for a daily huddle. I said the same thing. Today, I can’t imagine life without my daily huddle. It's my daily company heartbeat! For more on daily huddles from Verne Harnish the founder of YEO and Gazelles Inc., go to: http://www.gazelles.com/columns/Daily%20Meeting.pdf

Weekly Manager Meetings
I not only have weekly individual meetings with each manager, we also take one hour and have a manager meeting together. Always make sure you go into your meetings with agendas. We take turns making them.

Monthly Huddles
This is your company-wide meeting. We do a complete huddle (what's up, where are you stuck, metric report). Then we cover company happenings, an idea generation session and vote for the DWIT (Doing Whatever It Takes Award).

Quarterly Retreats
The management team goes off-site once a quarter and digs deep into finances, strategy, planning and develops the next theme. Sometimes, we'll get a facilitator.

For more on alignment, go back to http://www.gazelles.com/. Verne Harnish really is the guru on this concept and I have adopted many of his philosophies with great success.

Happy huddling!