Human Element

In any business there are going to be goals assigned the business plan. The key for a leader is to determine goals that are fair, consistent and can be attained. In business leaders sometimes throw a number out there with no real plan of action on how to attain the goal. This is where data can come into the discussion. Most large businesses today operate under a data driven model like six sigma. This creates the guess work out of how to come to conclusions about business the only problem with this system is it does not always look at the human element that might be involved. In other words there might be an opportunity to drive more sales through a direct mail marketing approach and the numbers look great for this venture. The only area that might be lacking is the knowledge the sales people have about the product or service that is being offered.

This is what I would call the human element, will they be able to handle in the incoming questions, will the service level drop due to lack of training. It is important for a leader to identify these areas of concern and make sure regardless of the data are you truly looking at the Human Element. I can remember a time where our company was changing to a different software system we went through all the formal training and everyone seemed to be on track. After a couple of weeks we noticed some associates were still using the old system which was slowing down productivity. After having a conversation we realized the roll out was not effective the training was not consistent and the goals on how fast to be up to speed for the conversion were not attainable. We lost some very good people because of this transition and ultimately cost the organization tremendous amounts of money. If we would have reviewed the Human Element in the beginning we would have created focus groups, rolled the conversion out in pilots and created an excitement about the change. All of which are standard in future projects.