In most organizations, org charts are used for a single purpose – to give new employees a visual representation of the company’s hierarchy. Beyond that, most companies don’t utilize the power of org charts for much else.

Most companies view org charts for simply that purpose and that purpose only. But did you know that you can use org charts to improve virtually every area of your organization? Using org charts can lead to sales proposals closing more quickly, marketing initiatives producing augmented results, and the enhancement of the overall business intelligence and management of the company.

Here are three org chart tactics that will help you improve your organization’s productivity.

Using Org Charts in the Sales Department

Sales people are in a constant state of flux. Data turns to leads, leads to opportunities, opportunities to deals. Along the way sales teams and agents are collecting additional data to help close the sale. Although every prospect has different needs that the sales agent must attend to, the sales agent’s most important piece of information is to know who the decision makers are within the organization. An org chart is a simple way of tracking that information for better, smarter results.

During the sales qualification process any sales person involved should create and update an org chart for a visual representation of the customer’s organization in order to better understand who needs to be persuaded in order for the sale to actually go through. By building an org chart with this information on it the agent now becomes better equipped to find and contact the appropriate person for decision making and future return sales opportunities.

Org charts also have the added benefit of being able to help sales people rapidly communicate all of the information they’ve gathered during the communication process to each other should multiple sales people need to be involved. An org chart should be part of every client file you open.

For example, say you are a sales agent for a company that sells web analytics tools to track web traffic on websites. Your primary client relationships that you forge within various organizations would be the Marketing Director. But if the Marketing Director, Bill Jones, of one of your biggest clients named ABC Company leaves, will your relationship with the company remain intact? You may find that transitioning the client relationship to the next Marketing Director might be far less turbulent if you have an org chart of the entire marketing department and have developed relationships with some people on the team. In fact, one of those people may be the eventual person who assumes the role now left vacant (see below).

Using Org Charts in the Marketing Department

The marketing department of your organization should employ a similar tactic as the sales department using org charts to track the hierarchy and organizational structure of clients. Marketing departments are constantly challenged with communicating the benefits of the company’s products and services in order to create a pipeline of leads and opportunities for the sales department.

One of the ways to achieve this is to look for additional opportunities among your existing pool of clients. So, why not create a clear picture of your clients’ organizational structure by creating org charts to identify other cross-selling and undeveloped relationship opportunities?

Again, these client org charts provide terrific business intelligence to understanding your clients more thoroughly, how each one functions, what roles the individuals play, and, what opportunities have yet to be realized.

For example, say you are an intellectual property attorney at a large full service law firm and one of your clients is a new video game maker. Currently, as the attorney for the company you are the only one that serves their legal needs, but your firm marketing director creates an org chart (below) and together you realize that the company has grown in size in a short period of time and may have some employment and labor law needs like employee handbooks and policies that your firm could handle on their behalf. Because of the org chart, you now have a possible cross-selling opportunity to pitch and potentially have a larger scale client than previously though.

Click to see a larger version of this image.

Using Org Charts in Executive Management

As previously mentioned, org charts provide a unique source of business intelligence which is the crux of the decision making process for members of the executive management team in a company. While the sales and marketing teams are tracking prospects and clients with org charts, the executive management team can plan organizational change of the business with org charts.

This is expanded in greater detail in two previous Working Smarter articles entitled “Playing ‘What If?’ with Your Organization” and “What Do You Do When There Are Not Enough People to Get the Work Done”. The executive management team of a company benefits from knowing the hierarchical structure of the business and the functional relationship with each member. Org charts allow them to look into how lean the organization is or not, and how to plan for growth. Bloated departments may be trimmed, and other departments that may be under realized can be bulked up for the betterment of the organization.

In summary, if you begin using org charts for more than the hierarchy of your own company, your business will augment the overall intelligence regarding prospects, clients, competitors and strategic partners.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras is a book that I read in college, and it changed the way I looked at business. In the book Collins and Porras analyze eighteen visionary and long-standing companies (3M, Disney, and Wal-Mart for example) and compare them against their top competitors.

Their goal was to determine what makes these companies different. Why do some companies fail and why do others last for decades after their founders have left?

Built to Last contains all of their research, analysis, and conclusions and I wanted to discuss some of the points that are highly relevant to what we’ve discussed at Working Smarter.

Don’t Tell Time, Build Clocks – Institutionalize Knowledge and Process within Your Organization

One of the major themes throughout Built to Last is the concept of Time-Telling vs. Clock-Making. A time-teller is a key employee – whenever someone in your organization needs to know what time it is they go and ask the one time-teller in your organization that always produces an accurate time.

But what happens when that key employee leaves your organization? Nobody in your organization will be able to tell time, query the customer database, build a new version of the product, or do any of the other million things that are fully known only to a select handful of experienced, key employees. If a business has to spend all of its time reinventing the wheel instead of innovating its products and services, then it probably won’t be very successful in the long run.

So what do truly exceptional companies do? They don’t tell time, they build clocks. They stop reinventing the wheel and institutionalize knowledge. They develop business processes and document them in a central location such that the organization no longer depends on knowledge being passed down from employee to employee orally – instead that specialized knowledge becomes part of the organization’s inner-workings. That institutionalized knowledge forms a clock that enables every person in the organization to tell time on their own.

Ask yourself: are you a time-teller or a clock builder? If you’re not building clocks already, then you should get started by learning how to document your organization’s processes.

Preserve Your Core Values, But Try New Things

Truly exceptional companies have a set of core values that are fundamentally unalterable – everything in the company can change except for their core values. They can make different products, they can enter different markets, they can be run by different people, but they never waiver from their core principles and values.

Built to Last uses IBM as an example here, showing their three core principles (give full consideration to the individual employee, spend a lot of time making customers happy, and go the last mile to do things right), the success IBM had when they followed them (up until the mid-1980s or so), and the failures after they started adhering to secondary principles, like corporate culture and such. (Source: The Simple Dollar)

Companies should always be trying new things, but they should do so within the parameters of their core principles. So what’s an easy way to try new things and preserve the core? As Fred Nickols explained, the best way to do that is to use a goals grid when planning any new initiative.

A goals grid is a simple way that allows you to balance all of your concerns and goals – it allows you to have a complete landscape over what you want to preserve (core values, successful old initiatives), what you want to eliminate from your organization (waste), what you want to steer your organization away from (extraneous values that contradict the core), and things that you want to achieve (growth, profitability.)

How Else Can You Build Your Company to Last?

The first thing you should do is get a copy of Built to Last! The second thing you should do is look to making some improvements within your company’s culture, operations, and philosophy:

• Determine areas where you have “key employee” problems and try to mitigate them by institutionalizing knowledge with processes, information management systems, and training programs;
• Determine your core values and make sure that every person in the company understands what they are;
• Use goal planning tools, such as the goals grid, to help you get a clearer bearing on your company’s direction; and
• Communicate often and clearly to your team regarding the company’s culture, direction, goals, and bearings. Let everyone see the forest from the trees.

We cover a lot of these topics in our Working Smarter Learning Center, so please check that out if you’d like to read more.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

In a previous entry, “Why Communicate Visually,” it was asserted and backed by scientific study that communicating visually is a far easier and quicker way to comprehend both simple and complex information for 8 out of 10 people.

Skeptical? Would you like to see for yourself? Below are three side-by-side visual versus text comparisons of the same information. Which of these engages you more quickly and creates the “a-ha” moment first?

Restroom Location at a Family Restaurant

VISUAL

TEXT

Directions to restroom from front door

- Walk towards the kitchen for about 15 feet.

- Make your first right past the tall palm tree.

- The first door to your right is the restroom for Women.

- The second door to your right is the restroom for Men.

Company History

VISUAL

TEXT

- In 2005, Standard mobile phone sold approximately 22.1 million units. In the same year, 6.1 million units of Smart Phones were sold.

- In 2006, standard phones sales dropped by 7 million units compared to the previous, while Smart Phones increased by over 2.5 million units.

- By 2007, Smart Phones passed standard phones in total units sold by nearly double.

- In 2008, Smart Phones sold 24.7 million units, while standard phones continued to decline only selling 5.7 million units.

Department Organizational Structure

VISUAL

TEXT

- Bill Jones is the Marketing Director for the company.

- Natalie Ryan reports to Bill Jones and supervises the Graphics Coordinator Samantha Davis.

- Connor Michaels is also a mid-level manager serving as the Website Manager. Travis Duncan, the Web Coordinator, reports to Connor.

- Jan Smith is the head Copywriter and Editor and manages one other Staff Writer Jeremy Yates.

- Thomas Dodd manages the internet Marketing strategy and supervises Carlos Lopez, who serves as the team’s Marketing Analyst.

As you can see, bulleted information is not always the easiest way to absorb and comprehend information. With visuals, one is able to comprehend more quickly an abundance of information and recall it from memory more easily.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

This is part four of a four-part guest post contributed by Fred Nickols, Managing Partner of Distance Consulting LLC. All four parts focus on improving your problem solving efforts.

Tip #4: Draw pictures of the structure of the problem

A picture or model of the elements and relationships in a problem situation will help you to more quickly and more completely grasp the situation and figure out what to do about it.

Consider, for example, the diagram shown in Figure 4.  It depicts the structure of a general-purpose work sys­tem.  The elements of this system include inputs, a processor, outputs, a con­troller, and two control loops.  On the front end of this system is a task initia­tion loop and on the back end is an evaluation and termination loop (the dotted lines).  The relationships among these elements are such that inputs to the work system interact with the processor.  The interactions between inputs and proces­sor, which typically consist of prefigured routines, are referred to as “processes.”  These proc­esses produce the work system’s outputs.  All this occurs under the watchful eye of the controller.

If the outputs of the work system are faulty, several possibilities are suggested by the structure of the diagram in Figure 4.  The inputs might be faulty.  The processor or the controller might be malfunctioning.  Perhaps one or the other or both of the control loops is open and no information is getting through.  Whatever the contributing factors, the diagram provides guidance regarding places to look for what might be causing the problem and for what might have to be changed in order to solve it.

The use of diagrams or schematics as an aid to problem solving is not new.  Technicians have been using schematics as troubleshooting aids for years.  Computer programmers and systems analysts are familiar with, if not dependent on, flowcharts and data structure models.  Industrial engineers have relied on process flow diagrams ever since the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor.  Diagrams and schematics should be found in your problem solving toolbox too.

Most important, get in the habit of visualizing the problems you tackle.

More Information

This is an edited excerpt from a longer piece titled “Ten Tips for Beefing Up Your Problem Solving Tool Box” that appears on Fred Nickols’ articles web site (www.skullworks.com). Many other articles dealing with problem solving and additional workplace-related subjects can be found there as well. Fred can be contacted by e-mail at nickols@att.net.

Be sure to read the previous three parts of this article from Fred Nickols.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

Departing employees can have a tremendous impact on an organization if it is not properly prepared and equipped to handle it – especially if the employee is one of the “Top Dogs.”

How the departure affects your productivity

Ready or not, a whirlwind of a ride may await you unless you have done some basic preparation. No matter if you are the receptionist, or the next senior level manager to serve as the interim leader during the transition, you will be affected in some form or another. Your time will be divided exponentially due to the acquisition of new tasks, and the learning curve those tasks will require. In addition, your “usual” activities may get pushed somewhat to the background and can get overlooked if you are not careful.

Projects, tasks, and decisions may proceed more slowly if you are not prepared. So, what can you do to keep moving forward with a full head of steam? Document your responsibilities.

Begin by documenting all that you do, all that you are responsible for prior to the shift, and everything you take on during the transition. Document all of your projects, tasks, and decisions that you are involved with to standardize and organize them.

Once you have accomplished this you will be in a better position to organize and delegate some smaller oriented tasks out to your team. You will also be able to properly communicate expectations and how things are to be handled during the transition. This will also allow you to be able to bring the new “Chief” up to speed more quickly once the vacant role is filled.

How the departure affects general functions and processes

Does your business run on people and anecdotal information? Meaning, do things happen when the “top dog” says it should, and how it should? If so, you may find that company processes, projects, tasks, and management decisions will grind to a halt upon the departure of this person unless you get the processes and projects documented and systematized. When you move in this direction, you will find that you are not completely dependent upon people for the processes and projects to move forward, but more on a system that works and functions nearly independently and therefore managed by its people.

For example, say the departing leader has a specific decision making process proven to be successful (shown below) as to which projects are pursued, and which are not. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know what that process is, and refer to it during the transition? Of course it would. So acquire the information and create easy to understand visuals, like decision trees and flowcharts that serve as reference guides for you to be able to make good consistent decisions and keep progress moving in a forward direction in the same manner prior to the leader’s departure.

Click here to see a larger version of this visual.

The final task is how you communicate this back to your team. The repurposing of projects and tasks can be an emotional proposition for some as time and energy may already have been invested, so you will need to clearly communicate the reasoning behind any changes. The remedy? Share your visuals like the one above so that they understand how specific processes and decisions are made. The more transparent the process and decision making is, the more on board your employees will be about the procedures. Also, you avoid the same previous problem of having only one person with the understanding of the company “knowledge bank” and you forge trust and team communication amongst everyone.

The personnel of the organization are the most impacted when there are departures, and if processes and other pertinent information are stored anecdotally within only a few people then everyone feels the pain – including you. Take the time to document, organize, evaluate and communicate your processes, projects and decisions to keep your organization stable.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

This is part three of a four-part guest post contributed by Fred Nickols, Managing Partner of Distance Consulting LLC. All four parts focus on improving your problem solving efforts.

Tip #3: Think of problem solving as a “cover-the-bases” activity

Information does not make itself available to suit the requirements of anyone’s problem solving process.  Solving a problem in a complex organization has much in common with detective work.  We are forced to follow leads and unearth clues.  Further, it is generally the case in complex organizations that no one individual possesses all the information necessary to solve a given problem.  Vital information appears in bits and pieces.  We have different backgrounds, perceptual filters, and value priorities.  Different people seek and assimilate information in different ways.

Consequently, if you listen carefully to almost any discussion of a problem in a group setting, what you’ll hear is conversation that shifts from problem to symptom to cause to solution and back again, often in no particular order. Such “bouncing around” is natural.  Don’t worry about it.  Above all else, don’t try to force yourself (or others) to follow some lock-step, linear process.  The task of problem solving is very much a type of intelligence work, a matter of piecing things together.

A systematic approach is necessary but the point of having one is to make sure you tend to all the things that need tending to, that you “cover the bases,” not trot around them in a 1-2-3 fashion.  Figure 3 depicts a set of 12 “bases” to be covered or tasks that typically need tending to in the course of solving a problem.

Ordinarily, bases 4 and 5 are mutually exclusive; you do one or the other but not both.  If you’re dealing with a problem where something has gone wrong, then your best bet, at least initially, is to focus on finding and fixing the cause of the problem.  On the other hand, if you’re out to achieve some state of affairs never before attained, or if the cause of the problem has been found but can’t be corrected, then you’ll have to design and engineer a solution to the problem.  In either case, you’ll have to settle on a course of action and carry it out. 

Be sure to check back for part 4 from Fred Nickols. To read part one click here. To read part two click here.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

This is part two of a four-part guest post contributed by Fred Nickols, Managing Partner of Distance Consulting LLC. All four parts focus on improving your problem solving efforts.

Tip #2: Be clear about all of your goals and objectives

Ultimately, the aim of problem solving is action.  To engage in problem solving is to search for a solution.  A solution is a course of action that produces the solved state. To actually solve a problem is to implement the solution that has been found and demonstrate that it works.  Solving problems requires intervention as well as investigation.

Intervening in complex organizations requires of us that (a) we are clear about all our goals and objectives and that (b) we carefully think through the likely effects of any actions we are contemplating. 

Actions taken in an organizational context often “ripple” outward from the point of intervention, sometimes having unforeseen and unintended consequences.  Our goals and objectives, therefore, are typically multi-dimensional; that is, we seek to eliminate some conditions, and to achieve others.  There also are conditions we seek to preserve or avoid. (See Figure 2, the Goals Grid).

If we don’t want some­thing that already exists, our goal is typically one of eliminating it.  If we want something that doesn’t exist, our goal is ordinarily one of achieving it.  Four categories of goals and objectives can be derived from the interplay of our perceptions and prefer­ences:  Achieve, Preserve, Avoid, and Eliminate.

For any problem situation, it is useful to ask the fol­lowing questions as a way of clarifying all your goals and objectives:

• What are we trying to achieve?
• What are we trying to preserve?
• What are we trying to avoid?
• What are we trying to eliminate?

These same questions are also useful in examining any contemplated course of action. For example, if you’ve decided to solve the problems with a legacy accounts payable system by replacing it with a popular commercial version, you are well-served by asking the questions above in relation to that new accounts payable system.

Be sure to check back for parts 3 and 4 from Fred Nickols. To read part one, click here.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

This is part one of a four-part guest post contributed by Fred Nickols, Managing Partner of Distance Consulting LLC. All four parts focus on improving your problem solving efforts.

Introduction

Problems come in all sizes, shapes, and colors.  There is no guaranteed step-by-step or “by the numbers” process for solving every problem we encounter.  We must instead configure or adapt our problem solving processes to fit the problem at hand.  As problem solvers, we have more in common with the cabinet-maker than with the assembly-line worker.  What we need, then, are plans and blueprints, high-quality materials, a decent place to work, a well-stocked tool box, and the knowledge and skills necessary to properly select and use the tools in it.  Toward that end, here are four tips for “beefing up” your problem solving toolbox.

1. Focus on clearly defining the solved state.
2. Be clear about all your goals and objectives.
3. Think of problem solving as a “cover-the-bases” activity.
4. Draw diagrams and otherwise picture the structure of the problem.

Tip #1: Focus on clearly defining the solved state

Pay at least as much attention to the solved state as you pay to the problem state.  As Robert F. Mager’s fable of the sea horse reminds us, “If you’re not sure where you’re going, you’re liable to end up someplace else—and not even know it.”

When solving a problem, we typically wish to do more than simply rid ourselves of some unacceptable situation.  More often than not we are trying also to achieve some other, more desirable state of affairs.

Conceptually speaking, we’re trying to move from the problem state (a) to the solved state (a’).  We do so by traversing what is called “the solution path” (see Figure 1).

It seems obvious that if we do not focus some of our attention on the solved state, the likelihood of attaining it is diminished.  Unfortunately, the problem state typically attracts all our attention.  The squeaky problem state wheel gets the grease.  On occasion, this is an appropriate response.  If the roof is caving in, then discussions about where to go can wait until we’re safely outside.

But, if we’re not in an emergency situation and if we still have nothing more in mind than doing something to rid ourselves of the problem state, we can create situations where the solution to one problem creates one or more new problems.  Solutions that create new problems are “inefficient” solutions.  An “efficient” solution is one that creates no new problems.

Perhaps the best-known step in any problem solving process is the one most people think of as the first step:  “Define the Problem.”  This is probably the most misunderstood and poorly executed step in the process.  For many people, “Define the Problem” means simply to provide a written statement of the problem.  There is much more to it than that. To define means to establish boundaries, to encompass, to enclose, to locate, to isolate, to distinguish, to differentiate, to set apart.  To define the problem state (or the solved state) means, at the very least, to do the following:

• To establish boundaries; to delineate (Locate).
• To give distinguishing characteristics; to differentiate (Isolate).
• To state the nature of; to describe precisely (Articulate).
• To state the meaning of; to provide a definition (Explicate).

Rarely are definitions of the problem state or the solved state crystal-clear up front.   Clarity typically develops over time.  In many cases, the definition of a problem may be considered complete only after the problem has been solved.  Until then, it is a shifting, evolving, changing part of the process.  Thus, although “Defining the Problem” is a good step with which to begin the problem solving process, it is only a starting point and it must be revisited on a regular basis.  This also is true of any definition of the solved state.

There are several ways of focusing on the solved state.  One is to define it the same way we would define the problem state.  Another is to list possible measures or indicators of its attainment. Ask yourself questions like these:  “How will I know the problem has been solved?  What will I accept as evidence?  What does the solved state look like?”  Yet another way is to be clear about all the goals and objectives of the problem solving effort.  (This last point is so important that it constitutes a tip all its own—the next one.)

Be sure to check back for parts 2, 3 and 4 from Fred Nickols.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

Ideas make money, and thus we should make time for ideas. As valuable as brainstorming is, most of us don’t have the luxury of spending hour after hour sitting in meetings scrawling ideas down on scratchpads and whiteboards. Although we should always be in a creative, big-picture mindset on our own time, group brainstorming is extremely helpful and we should spend our creative time together in the most efficient manner possible.

Here are five ways you can jumpstart your organization’s creative process in order to get the best return on your team’s time:

1. Be clear about your objectives – Spouting out ideas purposelessly accomplishes little. You need to set some clear direction before you can direct your people’s energy towards some innovative end. Goals don’t have to be specific, but they need to be unambiguous. Here are some examples: develop new ways to improve a product, develop new concepts for future products, develop ideas for making customer communication more engaging, etc…

2. Be inclusive – Everyone has something different (and potentially valuable) to bring to the table. Should you invite the whole company into one meeting to brainstorm ideas for a new marketing campaign? Probably not, but it would be a good idea to invite some people from sales and some from the product research team who could offer perspectives about what current and potential customers are looking for.

3. Establish clear boundaries – The creative process involves two parts: the ideas people come up with as a group and the ideas people come up with while they are working on implementing the idea formed during the group meeting. Establish a clear boundary between those two things – when you’re discussing a new marketing campaign, the details of what graphics you’re going to use aren’t relevant until after you’ve agreed on a general concept for the campaign.

4. Organize your ideas – In addition to simply creating ideas, it’s important to organize and categorize them. For this there is no better tool than a mind map. I did a post a year ago which shows you step-by-step how to use mind maps to organize your ideas. The purpose of organizing your ideas is to take everything you produce during a brainstorming session and to start prioritizing and grouping everything so you can actually begin developing your ideas into products. Organizing your ideas also helps you construct a clearer, bigger picture from the sum of all of the component parts that you and your team develop during the brainstorming process. It’s a very simple exercise that gives a big return on investment.

5. Give your co-workers ownership of their work – Ideally you want your co-workers to extend the creative process from the brainstorming meeting all the way back to their desks, and the best way to do that is to give them ownership over their work. When people feel like they have a certain freedom to freely make decisions and make mistakes, they are enabled to try new things and new ideas.

Did I leave any out? Are there any other major ways to improve productivity? Let us know in the comments!

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.