Tag Archives: Collection

How Do You Delegate on a Team Basis? Four Options

Situation: A CEO wants to develop a collection of skills within her team as an alternative to just having individuals with skills. For example, her role means that she must travel frequently, often for over a week at a time. How can she develop a system to temporarily reallocate the time of the team to cover her responsibilities while she’s away. How do you delegate on a team basis?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • If the team functions on a high level, this is not really a problem. They will step up.
    • Plan for the time frame during which the CEO will be away.
    • List all responsibilities to be covered and set priorities for response. Focus on the highest priorities first. Delegate them or use them as cross-training opportunities for team members.
    • Meet with team ahead of time. Go over what has to be covered. Ask who can cover this, and delegate first, second and third responders – not just a single individual. This is important so that they know that they are backed up as well. Ask: What concerns or questions do you have? Have the team develop solutions.
    • Where processes are involved, break down the process. Create a decision tree and work with the team on how to make decisions with resources available.
    • Set priorities for the time away before leaving. Ask the team how they would handle situations and coach them if they are not sure. Identify resources for them to use if needed.
  • Use the model that a special forces team uses to train and prepare for missions:
    • Know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
    • Know how to back each other up.
    • Set up situations that are likely to arise and rehearse.
  • Another good model is engineering decision trees.
    • Create decision trees for how frequently occurring situations are handled to help team members determine the proper course of action and how to utilize which resources to respond to these situations.
  • Note the difference between reactive and proactive responsibilities.
    • Train the team to respond to reactive situations.
    • Schedule proactive responsibilities around planned time away to facilitate involvement in these as necessary.
    • Flexibility is critical.

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How Do You Manage Cash Flow and Growth? Five Thoughts

Situation: A company faces dual challenges – assuring that payments are collected for work done and developing a business model that facilitates growth. How do assure that payments are collected to support your cash flow needs and that employees are focused on growth?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • It may be that the two problems are closely related. Ask whether your compensation and incentive system is focused on cash flow and growth. If not, you need to change it.
    • Restructure your compensation and incentive systems to create a direct link between profitability and compensation. Augment this with training. For example, if your engineering team isn’t good at assuring that change order costs are paid by their clients, teach them how to write statements of work to anticipate change requests and to include charges in the SOW. Then tie the team’s compensation to how well team members follow though in assuring that work is properly accounted for, billed, and payment collected.
  • Create simple procedures that are innate and complementary to team members’ natural behavior. The best way to do this is to involve them in the writing of the procedures.
  • Give them easy tools that take the guesswork out of negotiating change orders with clients. For example, if a client asks for faster delivery, give them a formula that ties delivery to cost::
    • Standard Delivery = 8 weeks at Price X
    • 4 Week Delivery = Standard delivery price times Y
    • 2 Week Delivery = Standard delivery price times Z

This turns client demands into a simple economic question – what is expedited delivery worth to you?

  • Hire a contracts manager to track contracts and change orders with authority to assure that change order costs are being billed.
  • Create “learning” teams to develop solutions. Allow the teams to speak to each other and to learn each other’s best practices. Supplement this with regular tutorial sessions to bring the whole group up to speed on new technologies.

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