You see a lot of arguments around trusting the process and the results will follow. But what if you don’t see the results that you like? How long do you continue with the same process while waiting for a result that you want? This post will talk a little bit about how long do you simply trust the process before you need to re-invent the process.
Define Your Goals
Without defined goals, your process or results will be meaningless. What is your goal? How will you know if your results are moving you closer to or farther away from your goal? Setting that stake in the ground will be the benchmark that your process strives to hit and your results being the measure of how close you are. Perhaps your goal is to have a strong financial outlook for your professional services department. Now that you’ve defined your goal you can work on a process by which you are going to achieve your goal and use your results to measure how effective your process is in achieving your goals.
Set Your ‘Walking Away’ Mark
Much like buying a car or a house you need to set a line in the sand which you are going to walk away from your current process and try something new. Determine how long you will accept results that do not move you towards your goal before deciding you are going to change the process. This gives the current process a chance to meet your requirements as well as provides opportunities for small tweaks along the way.
Continual Process Evaluation
While your results tell you how close you are to your goal and whether or not your processes need to change, you should not be afraid to implement small tweaks as you go that you feel are going to get your results inching more towards your goal. The cycle of plan-do-check-act needs to be remembered when executing towards a goal. Remember that results are just a measuring stick and should not be the goal itself. Don’t be afraid to take a step back to assess not only how the results match up to your goal but the process itself to see if it is adding value or not. And if not, determine what changes you can make to continually improve your process to meet your goals and objectives.