Belinda Noakes from The Leadership Sphere, a 14-year-old Melbourne firm, joined SYSTEMology Catalyst to build systems and reduce reliance on the managing director. They created a system for documenting processes, built performance dashboards, and shifted the culture toward continuous improvement. Belinda says linking systems to performance numbers is what gets teams to buy in.
My name's Belinda Noakes, I work for the leadership sphere and my role is the lead for strategy and planning. So the company is based in Melbourne, Australia, is about 14 years old and provides leadership development services for Australian organisations. For the first few years, the team at TLS was small and with the managing director doing a lot of the delivery work for clients. The managing director is now keen to get himself out of the center of the business so that the business can grow beyond the number of hours that he has in his day. And I know that the Phil, the managing director was really inspired by Dave Jennin's personal story of what he'd done, taking himself out of the centre of the business and freeing himself up to do other work both in the business and alongside it. When I started the Catalyst program, the team at the company had started to document some systems. They had some fundamental processes, documented some systems in place, but they were aware that there were some big gaps that needed to be filled, which we've started to do. The biggest win that we've achieved would actually be the recognition that it's quite hard to introduce a systems culture into a company and it's not something that happens really, really quickly and it's something that's hard to do without support, but the support of a practitioner plus the support of a peer group will just give you a kind of a rush of momentum for six months which will be invaluable and that is enough time not to get it all done. Don't expect to get it all done in a six month program, but it's enough time for enough members of the team to really shift the their mindset and their day to day practices that you won't go back to where you were before. One of the things that I really liked about the program was that most of the participants found the culture change piece hard. Most of the participating companies had at least one person in the team who was fairly resistant for various reasons and we were able to actually talk about that together and essentially workshop strategy for dealing with it. Where we're at now is that we have a system for creating systems. So everybody on our team who's responsible for creating systems, which is just about everybody, understands how to record a good video of themselves doing something that is going to be useful to somebody else later on. We've got a repository with some systems documentation in it and we've taken some really good steps towards it becoming just a normal part of our everyday practice that when as we do things, we record ourselves going through the steps because it's really easy with systems and processes, we found to get really hung up on needing to do it perfectly, meaning perfect documentation and perfect as in every single process. And you don't actually need to do that in order to make a real difference in the business. Like a lot of small businesses, when we started this process, we didn't have very good visibility on some of the critical numbers that are indicators of how the business is performing. And that is probably the area where we've had the most success, which is that we now have a bunch of different dashboards that help us to track how we're doing on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly basis. That shift towards more of a performance focused mindset seems to naturally then pull systems and processes along behind it because everybody's actually focused on how can we keep improving. And systems and processes are such an integral part of that. It's amazing to have really, really clear shared goals and targets. Just sharpening the mindset, sharpening the focus on those shared goals opens up a conversation around, okay, what else do we want to achieve as a team and how can systems help us to do that? So it helps to give a context. When there's a link between systems and performance, then it actually starts to get interesting for maybe not all, but most of the team at least. I really, really like Dave's vision and his mission of giving small and medium sized businesses, in particular real tools and real mindset shifts that can help them succeed and go on to become the medium sized and large businesses of the future. I really love it.
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