Everyone has at least one area of their life where they’ve totally failed. I have several. But the training of our dogs is perhaps the most VISIBLE to the outside world! 😊
We have attempted to train our dogs not to bark at people but without fail, if someone walks by our house, the dogs will bark ridiculously loud for an embarrassingly prolonged period.
And rather than deal with this problem by fixing it, we built a privacy fence. Our entire backyard is constructed around their deficiencies (or rather our deficiency in training them) because it’s so out of control.
Odds are, the same is true in your business.
We all have an “area” of our business where we’ve constructed a “fence” to accommodate a problem we’re avoiding addressing.
Because of this, the rest of the business must orbit around that weakness.
It’s the equivalent of having a tree fall through your ceiling after a storm and rather than fixing the ceiling and removing the tree, you and your team continue to inefficiently work around it.
It might be outdated software, training, a system, or process that you and/or your team is using on a regular basis that slows them down.
At one point, it served its purpose, but the business has evolved and now it no longer works well. You or your team have designed workarounds and Band-Aids to keep things moving, but it’s a sluggish, duct-tape job at best.
You say to yourself, it’s not “broken,” so you keep using it. But if you really were to look at what it’s COSTING you in time, energy, and frustration – it’d be clear it’s time to tear down the fences you’ve erected to hide the problem and just fix it.
It might be a person on the team.
Their performance is slowing everyone down because the rest of the team must adjust to accommodate for that person’s deficiencies. Bottom line, that person is not doing their job.
And rather than having the tough but loving conversation with them and addressing the issue(s), we construct fences around the person to contain it.
Newsflash …
Fences don’t fix problems.
They only allow the problem to get bigger.
Take it from the dog owner who despite building the fence, has dogs that continue their annoying barking because they have found a way to see over the fence by standing on the deck or looking out the window.
What about you?
What’s a “fence” you have consciously or subconsciously constructed in your business over time that needs to be taken down so you can address the REAL problem rather than trying to cover it up?
What’s one action you could take this week to address that?
