Business Excellence Blog

When you are a new a manager, all eyes are on you. Whether you start in a new company or are promoted in your own company, it is important to learn, not to teach.

A survey regarding the characteristics required for successful management was conducted seven years ago. The survey’s analysis and results revealed that participants rated “mentoring abilities” one of the ten most important qualities of a successful manager.

A company gave its employees a quarterly bonus. The bonuses were granted to employees who met their personal targets, which were determined according to an agreed scale. The employees were used to receiving the quarterly bonus and eagerly anticipated it at the end of each quarter.

In one of the trainings sessions, I recently conducted for leading improvement teams, Tamir, one of the trainees, said that in his opinion, employees don’t leave the jobs, they leave their managers. In other words, they left their jobs because of their direct managers. “That is the main reason employees leave or stay on in the job”, he claimed.

Do you remember the days when we worked six days a week? Has moving to five days had a bad effect on employers or employees? Has efficiency decreased? Have we been achieving less?

Assuming the company sells 20 products, the items are listed from the products generating the highest profit at the top of the list to the products generating the lowest profit at the bottom of the list. According to the Pareto principle, there is a good chance that the first four products on the list produce around 80% of the company’s revenues. If we focus on improving the profitability of these four products, we will achieve substantial improvement of the company’s profitability in an effective way.

A CEO I once met, who well understood the importance of measuring but could not maintain systematic, continuous measuring performance, excused himself by saying that he had strong intuition and knew his company well without measuring. Intuition and gut feelings are valuable and important when making decisions. However, they do not replace measuring.

Part VII is the last chapter in the series. It includes a short summary of the previous chapters.

The current series of articles focuses on the important KPIs every business must monitor. I have written articles regarding this very important issue over the past few years. However, the current series presents KPIs in a concise form, easily expanded, when required.

This article will present the KPIs under the responsibility of Quality and Marketing managers. Annual and special KPIs will follow at the end of the article.