Why do businesses intentionally inflict wounds on themselves? Isn’t that what we do when owners know there’s a problem, but don’t do anything about it? Or we know we need to do something but don’t know where or how to start, so we don’t act. It’s like when we inflict wounds on our own body when we know something isn’t right, and we ignore it thinking it will go away.
How many times have you heard of individuals (maybe some in your family, maybe you) ignoring feelings of pain, later to be diagnosed with cancer. The doctors would say that if it was treated earlier, it wouldn’t have spread so far. Ignoring symptoms can be fatal! So what symptoms are you ignoring?
Symptoms Can Be Fatal
Ignoring symptoms in your business can also be fatal! If you don’t pay attention to the symptoms your business is feeling, you may be heading towards years of heartache and illnesses in your business life. We die as mortal beings, and so do businesses. But wouldn’t it be much more rewarding to live a healthy and optimized business life? Just as you need to address symptoms in your own body when you feel something isn’t right; you need to do the same for your business. Think of your business as a human body (the perfect system), a living organism. It has certain needs in order to be at peak performance.
Let’s start with the need to live a healthy life so we can live long and prosper. We do that by having healthy habits. Those habits are formed in our early development stages as an infant and toddler. It’s carried through to our teen, early adult and late adult years. If you have healthy habits throughout all those stages, you’ll stand a better chance of living longer and being prosperous. Stephen Covey tells the story of the goose and the golden egg in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Sometimes we’re so focused on getting more golden eggs that we fail to realize that the goose is the one producing the golden eggs. If we kill the goose or make it sick, there are no golden eggs. His story emphasizes that effective leaders need to take care of themselves or they are no help to anyone. As parents, we need to put the oxygen mask on first in case of an emergency on a plane; or we won’t be of any help to our children. This applies to our business bodies as well.
Our business body needs to be healthy to produce the income that supports several families. Pat Lencioni’s book, The Advantage, has a subtitle that states, “Why organizational health trumps everything else in business.” It focuses on clarity of business strategies across the organization, which helps produce a healthy organization. Merely having a great product is not enough to compete in our current global market. Relying on a great product is short-lived if your business is slowly dying of cancer (no more golden eggs without the goose). Your business needs to start healthy, stay healthy, and you need to know what to do when it becomes sick. How to do that will be my topic in the next series of blogs.
Health Produces Profit
When you’re healthy, you spend less money on healthcare for doctor visits, procedures, medicine, etc. When your business body is healthy, you spend less money on consultants, recruiters, professional services (accountants and lawyers), overpaid employees, etc. Healthy living produces less costs in the long run, both as individuals and as businesses. When you ignore a symptom, you are electing to pay for more costs down the road as a consequence. When you develop bad habits that hurt your business/health, you are intentionally trading a longer life for a shorter life. When you’re healthy, you spend less time at hospitals and have less recovery time. When your business body is healthy, you spend less time counseling employees, doing damage control with customers, redoing work, or catching up on late projects.
Healthy businesses spend more time on developing their employees and creating more value for their customers. Healthy businesses withstand the downturns in the economy or devastating blows from competitors while weaker/unhealthy businesses don’t have the energy or wherewithal to keep standing.
Imagine your business at its healthiest state ever! What would that look like? Pat Lencioni uses Southwest Airlines frequently as a great organization . . . a healthy organization. Unlike its competitors who have gone through bankruptcies and layoffs, Southwest Airlines has experienced 41 consecutive years of profitability, even through 9/11. They still have challenges but they’re able to withstand the setbacks because they maintain a healthy business life, making them one of the most admired companies in the world.
Can you picture your business as a healthy, fine-tuned body performing at its peak? You have the right people in the right seats. Your processes are seamless. Your infrastructure is providing just the right support for your company, its people and its customers. Your business is a high-performing athlete. How much profit would you have with less employee problems, less rework and waste, less fees from outside help? How much time would you have left for more leadership and culture development, for adding more value to your customers? How much more time would you have in your personal and family life?
Healthy Businesses = Thriving Businesses = Thriving Business Owners
So if you’re just starting a business, have owned a business for several years, or trying to revive your business; take a page from the health and exercise books and live a healthy life . . . for your business! Start, maintain, and live a healthy business lifestyle. Look at your business body as a human body. Don’t ignore symptoms that your business body is telling you. If something is not feeling right, diagnose and treat.
Take the Organizational Checkup to gauge the health of your company! For more information on creating a healthy business lifestyle, read about the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS).
Read my next blog series to breakdown the business body and how we can live healthy through People, Process and Infrastructure!
To Your Business Health!