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Maintenance Prevents Pain

Guest post by: David Liddell

Article Overview: Prevent organization pain, calamity, and upsets by examining your business closely. You may find there are plenty of opportunities for preventative maintenance

Maintenance Prevents Pain

My dentist has a plaque in his office that says "Only floss the teeth you want to keep". This is pretty good advice for those of us who want to keep our teeth and equally important to prevent dental pain. This same philosophy should be used to prevent organization pain, calamity, and upsets. With the highly dynamic nature of most company operations, it is no wonder issues arise followed by "we didn't see that coming".

I am a big fan of preventative maintenance, in general, whether it is related to the upkeep of my car, house, or business. History has proven the positive and long lasting effects - it just makes sense.

If you examine your business closely enough you will find there are plenty of opportunities for preventative maintenance... watch out for these gotchas...

• 1. Pain: A newly promoted manager fails to meet expectations. This can disrupt business performance and be disastrous for team morale.

Maintenance: Don't promote individuals on functional performance alone, instead... create a leadership talent pool and development program with the explicit purpose of identify those employees with the ability to assume greater leadership responsibility. Identify the competencies most critical to your company's success and let them serve as the basis for all promotions.

• 2. Pain: Losing a highly talented employee to your competition. Add up the time dedicated to developing this employee plus projected lost opportunity equates to real dollars.

Maintenance: Don't treat all employees the same way, instead... purposefully build a working environment and leadership culture that rewards individual and team performance equally. Train your leaders to recognize and appreciate their employees' unique talents, desires, and motivators. This will drive employee engagement, retention, and organizational performance.

• 3. Pain: Making a hiring mistake. You won't see it on your profit and loss statement but studies have conclusively measured productivity losses in thousand dollar increments - the higher the salary, the greater the loss.

Maintenance: Don't make hiring decisions on your "gut feeling", instead... adopt a selection and hiring model that analyzes past experience, cognitive ability, and core behavior (past behavior is the greatest indicator of future behavior). Make it a universally understood process for all hiring managers to help eliminate the guess work in selecting the best candidate for the job.

• 4. Pain: Lack of accountability and discipline. It can be incremental or pervasive but either way it can cripple an organization's ability to reach its targeted objectives and goals.

Maintenance: Don't ignore the subtle but telltale signs of poor performance, instead... incorporate a performance management system that has a built-in early warning system, a consistent feedback mechanism, corrective action process, and rewards success. (Further reading on this topic below...)

Sounds easy, right? And it can be, but only if you see the importance of prevent maintenance and you make it an integral part of running your business.

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Article Tags: business pain, examine business, prevent calamity, preventative maintenance



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Re: What works for you? - If you love your work, then there is no pressure. So, pressure builds up when you work for someone else. Actually, Pleasure and Pain are both side of one coin. You need to have both in order to succeed in life. Take risks and rewards are higher. Take less risks, the rewards are less. So, understand your capacity and take charge. Thanks, Robert
Seek Venture Capital & Funding - Hello, Greetings from India. I am Seeking Venture Capital for Offshore Software Company Start-up. Need advise along with Business Model Sample. I have a basic outline for an offshore company. 1. Technology - like Microsoft Dot Net, Java, LAMP 2. Talent Team - Found Good Technology Developers. 3. Where I can get the leads/potential customers - Leads have been identified who are willing to move forward offshore projects. 4. I do not have resources like funding. It is a very critical factor to me Industries: Manufacturing, Real Estate, Retail, Insurance, Distribution & Logistics, Healthcare, Industry Associations and Software Product Development, Agricultural Industries and Etc. Services: Offshore Software Development Company. Offices to be located: Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India and USA. Products/Services/Applications in areas like POS & Billing, Sales & Distribution, Production Planning, Material Management, Inventory Control, Plant Maintenance, Purchasing, Accounting and Logistics. Dynamic Web Programming with Database Driven Content Management Systems, Online Stores for E-Commerce, B2B Solutions, Community Portals, Website Redesign and Development, Custom ERP with Enterprise Wide Functional Modules such as Marketing, CRM, Accounting, Inventory Control, Sales & Distribution, Production Planning, Purchase & Stores, Logistics and Supply Chain. Seek your further questions and help. Thank you, Best Regards, Jayapratap.


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