Every entrepreneur wants to have a successful business. They all want the best for their businesses, however, until you know where you want to go, you’ll never be able to decide how to get there. This leads to managing framework in business; an understanding of this would help you get to the desired destination you plan for your business. The management framework is divided into values, mission, strategy, priorities, and measurements. It begins by basing your choices and purpose in your values, then drafting a clear mission statement about what you want to accomplish, and planning a strategy to help you achieve the results you want. It also helps you identify the obstacles that could keep you from achieving your mission and teaches you how to prioritize and overcome them. Finally, it helps you develop means to measure and evaluate your progress.
Values
Values are your principles, standards of conduct, and morals that govern your behavior in the workplace. They are formed from our desires and are the foundation of our decisions. Every business organizations have their different set of values. It is not compulsory that values must be the same for each organization because entrepreneurs have different mindset, plans, and goals for their businesses. When team members in an organization come together, they bring with them their value systems. it is important that teams, organizations, and individuals actively work to establish their values. You need to write your values down and practice them until they form a value system that supports the type of decision-making and culture you want.
Mission
Your mission is derived from your values and defines what you do to add value—in other words, it’s your purpose. Mission statements declare how you add value. Don’t you think that organizations whose employees know why the company exists and how they add value to their customers would be better at making decisions? Wouldn’t entrepreneurs similarly benefit from having a clearly defined objective?
The power of a mission statement comes from transforming your values into purpose. If a mission statement is not tied to shared values, it feels unreal.
To have an effective mission statement, you need to focus your efforts around a specific result. It can’t be a checklist of all the things you want to accomplish. It needs to take your shared values and find a way to express them in a focused powerful way. There is a temptation in business and in life to jump right to the planning stage to figure your strategy. Starting with strategy, however, can be disastrous because without the anchor of the “why” (values) or the “what” (mission), you can justify almost any “how” (strategy).
Strategy
Crafting a good strategy is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks organizations and individuals face because it forces them to confront their biggest challenges and opportunities head-on and create a plan for success. First, let’s explore what a strategy is not. Strategies are not goals; they’re plans to achieve goals. Strategies are not visions of success; they explain how you’ll succeed. Strategies don’t cover up problems; they expose them. Strategies are not rigid beliefs; they adapt to challenges. Strategies are not overarching principles; they’re realistic, calculated probabilities. Strategies are not vague; they’re explicit. In other words, your strategy isn’t your mission or your vision; it’s your plan to achieve them.
What makes a good strategy? Well, first it needs to be based on your values and mission. Remember that your strategy is a plan for how you’ll accomplish your mission. It’s pretty difficult to say how you’ll do something if you haven’t first identified what you are going to do and why you want to do it. If you have a strong alignment between your values, mission, and strategy, your team will be more effective because they’ll have a framework to make decisions with. Your vision and mission statements also provide the fuel that will sustain you when things are hard. You’re going to need that fuel because no matter how good your strategy is, you are going to get part of it wrong, and it will take dedication to your mission and values to make painful course corrections.
Second, strategy is fundamentally about choice—how will you accomplish your mission. You have to decide what you will do and what you will not do.
Thirdly, you’ve got to figure out what you can uniquely offer. It’s likely that other companies will have missions and values similar to yours. To be successful, you need to decide what you can uniquely offer that is difficult to copy. What unique gifts, talents, and resources do you have that can help you reach your goal? Are there groups of people who are not being served? What gaps are there in the market that you could fill? Finding your unique value-add may feel overwhelming, but every day, you’re confronted with situations where your unique talents are needed.
It’s not that different in business or your profession. What talents and abilities does your team have or would need to have to help others? If you start with the needs of others, you’re more likely to identify unmet demand in the market and find ways that you can uniquely serve them.
An additional aspect of a business strategy, however, is that it should also be difficult to copy. What assets or abilities does your organization have that would be difficult for others to reproduce? Could you be faster to market? Can you draw upon established resources? Do you have a unique process or technology that others don’t have access to? How would established businesses react to you? Could your strategy be disrupted by new technology or competition?
Prioritizing
A common way to prioritize work is to make a list of everything you need to get done and then rank them by importance — but how do you know which task is the most important? Sometimes people will look at their list and find the things they can quickly do, or they might start with the hardest task to get it out of the way, others prioritize by deadlines.
Prioritizing by risks means that you evaluate all the tasks you need to do to accomplish a goal and categorize them by how likely they are to cause you to fail.
Risk assessment works the same way in business. As you routinely review your values, mission, and strategies, you should constantly be asking yourself, “What could cause this project, venture, or process to fail? What changes in the market, technology, or economy present the biggest risk? How would your competitors react to your strategy?”
When you carefully study the threats and risks that are facing your business, your priorities become more clear. You are able to focus your energy on the things that matter most. Successful families and organizations are methodical about managing risks. They identify the biggest threats and reduce or eliminate them.
Measurement
If you’re trying to achieve a goal, it’s important to measure your progress so that you can see if what you are doing is working. It also allows you to make changes to your strategy based on information you receive. When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement increases. Here are a few reasons why you should use performance measures.
- It provides focus- You focus on what you measure. If you are measuring the most important things, then you’re focusing your effort on the right priorities.
- It provides meaning- Well-established metrics help individuals and teams understand how their contributions fit into the larger picture. When metrics clearly map back to your values and mission, it fuels employee morale, initiative, and productivity.
- It improves decision- As you test and measure, the number of things that you know goes up, and the number of things that you don’t know goes down. In other words, when you measure, your risk goes down, and your value goes up. This is what allows you to adapt your strategy as you go, rather than getting too far down a wrong road. Information-driven decisions can also strip away some of the emotional involvement that slows down decision-making.
- It improves collaboration- When done right, metrics improve collaboration because they provide a common language that teams can use to coordinate efforts. If your metrics are organized to achieve your shared vision and mission, then departments and teams are more likely to sacrifice or change for the greater good.
