Where Ideas, Experiences, and Lessons Learned Intersect

Continuous Improvement, Growth Mindset, and an “Attitude of Better”

Posted on March 11, 2020 Updated on May 15, 2020

This was originally posted on LinkedIn.com/in/chipn

When I had my own company our focus was on providing the absolute best services in a few niche areas. Our goal was to succeed in the spaces that were important yet underserved. We identified those areas, validated the need, evaluated the competition and our competitive positioning, determined the market potential, and then made an informed decision based on that data.

But, this was not a plan for winning. It was a roadmap to places that we could win, but nothing more.What would our strategy be? What specific problems would we solve? How would we create awareness around the potential impact of those problems? And, how would we position ourselves as being the best candidates to address those business needs? In short, what was our real purpose or raison d’etre?

Recognizing that void led to a couple of powerful revelations –

1.    It is great to have a goal of being the best at something, but don’t use that as an excuse to procrastinate. Learning and improving is an iterative process, so that goal by itself was not good enough.

2.    Adopting an “Attitude of Better” turned out to be a game-changer. We set our focus on continuous improvement and winning. We became customer-obsessed, driven to provide a better service and better results for each and every customer. We gauged our success by customer satisfaction, repeat engagements, and referrals.

3.    But, it wasn’t until we adopted an intentional Growth Mindset that our business really started to evolve and improve.

·      We leveraged each and every win to help us find and create the next win.

·      Our team was constantly pushing each other to raise the bar of knowledge, expertise, and performance.

·      Just as important was what occurred next. They became a safety net for each other. Failure for one meant failure for all and nobody wanted that. They became a high-performance team.

·      We created standard processes and procedures to ensure consistency and maintain the highest levels of quality. This applied to everything we did – from working on a task to writing trip reports, status reports, and proposals. It also reduced our risks when we chose an outsourcing partner to help us take on more concurrent projects.

·      Whenever possible we automated processes to maintain consistency while increasing efficiency, repeatability, scalability, and profitability.

·      We measured and tracked everything, analyzed that data, captured lessons learned, and continuously worked on improving (and documenting) every aspect of the business.

·      A byproduct of this approach was that we could offer leaner pricing based on accurate estimates having very small margins of error. Our pricing was competitive, we could fix price much of what we did, and our profit margins were very good. This allowed us to invest in further growth.

Our “attitude of better” also came across as confidence when selling to and working with new customers. Not only could we tell them stories of our success that included tangible metrics, most of our customers became references willing to talk about the value we added. Their stories included discussions about how much better things became as a result of our work.

Better became the foundation of what we did as well as the basis of those customer success stories.