The Business Priority is Trust!
The Business Priority is Trust
by Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions
What do high-performing organisations focus on as opposed from low-performing organisations, and what differentiates how they do it?
Businesses are under pressure, there is no doubt about that – but what are businesses focusing on and why in these difficult times? A recent report from from Interaction Associates (Building Trust in 2012) found the top 3 priorities for business to be:
- Top line/revenue growth
- Profit growth
- Improvements to Productivity and Efficiency
No surprise here – but what is interesting is the way in which high performing organsations (those whose net profit grew more than 5% over the last year) and low performing organisations (those under 5% over the last year or shrank) approached this.
High performing organisations focused on achieving this by focusing on the people aspects of the business, these included:
- Customer loyalty and retention
- Attraction, deployment, and development of talent
- Business agility (speed, flexibility, adaptability to change)
Low performing organisations focused on:
- Improvements to productivity & efficiency
- Cost reduction/becoming more efficient
- Business agility (speed, flexibility, adaptability to change)
The focus here is more on the systems and processes to drive results and create agility, rather than having the right customers and right people to drive both revenue and profit growth (as with high performers).
So what does this mean? Greater growth and profitability is driven by people. Systems, process improvements, and cost-reductions can contribute towards growth – the only problem is that there is only so many times that you can cut the lawn before it starts to die off. Conversely, focusing your attention on business and resources on the right customers and talent, rather than squandering it in a shotgun approach, enables you to grow the business with no limit on the upside. For this you need to inspire trust.
The key question then is this: are you trustworthy? More to the point do your customers and staff think you are trustworthy? What do you think you are – honestly? And how would you assess how trustworthy you are? Share your thoughts here.
Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.