Last weeks post we exposed you to System Theory and it’s correlation to the health of your company.  This post will address the first of four factors that we must look at…Factor One: The presence or absence of inefficiencies (disease) in the individual parts of a system.  The most basic individual part of any system is You.

It is important to first identify what system you are a part of.  If you work in a corporation, your system would be your department or section of a department.  For example, if you are an Accounts Payable Clerk, you may be part of Accounting, which is part of Finance.  Your system would be Accounts Payable.  If you are a  business owner, you may have oversight for the whole company, however your system is the planning and executing.  If you are a small business owner, you system is you company (other systems are vendors and customers).

Once you understand what your system is, you are ready to see how healthy you are.  We use the health reference because if the individual parts of the system are not efficient, then the whole system does not work well.  Most companies don’t know they are not working well (sick) until it manifests as a serious issue.  So lets begin by looking at the individual part of our system, us.

Now we are efficient in some areas, and we all have inefficiencies in our day to day performance of our jobs and lives (yes, even you).  Therefore we must:

1. identify where we believe we have inefficiencies and where we believe we are efficient
2. be honest and identify what others have identified as you inefficiencies and where you are efficient (tough one)
3. look at what you think are inefficiencies with others in your system (the individual parts of a system) and identify how you contribute to their inefficiencies
4. look at others and identify how you contribute to their efficiency
5. identify the parts of the processes in your system that you need to know more about.

It is important that you and the other parts of your system work on these five alone, and only after everyone is done, do you get together and identify how to make your system more efficient.  This will involve, compromise, working together, sharing best practices, understanding what makes each other happy, what makes each component satisfied and a team player.  In other words, how you can be efficient and mutually benefit every component of your system.