Your team can fall into a comfort zone and that’s not a good thing
To build the worth of your company so you can experience a euphoric event one day in selling your business, you want to avoid being in the comfort zone. Teams in a comfort zone can kill long term company worth.
Your team is in a comfort zone if they are just doing repeat activities on a regular basis without any regard being given to continuous improvement…doing better today than they did yesterday and doing better tomorrow than they did today. Leaders that keep their teams out of the comfort zone are generally those building the greatest company worth.
What causes a comfort zone in the first place? We’d all agree we don’t want to have this complacency set in at our company so then what causes it in the first place – here are the top reasons:
- The leader/manager isn’t raising the bar for their team. They too are in a comfort zone and not looking to challenge anything or anybody to raise the level of performance.
- Employees are fearful of taking any risk or making a mistake. Employees won’t try new things to improve the business if they are fearful of what it could mean for them personally if things go awry.
- There is a lack of training and development so people get comfortable because they don’t know of any other way.
- Comfort zones often occur in departments or entire organizations where there is a lack of good KPI (key performance indicator) management. KPI’s are a very effective tool for helping to drive performance improvements.
- The culture lacks a mechanism for rewarding or celebrating times when a comfort zone is challenged. Employees may not think their manager/leaders care about driving improvements because when they have been made in the past, there is no recognition. In this environment, why would the employee take the risk.
Sit with your leadership team and discuss these comfort zone enablers. As the expression goes, to decrease the comfort zone in your team you have to increase the discomfort zone. The phrase sounds extreme but look at the reasons above and see if any of them relate to your team. Addressing them today will be a gift to your future self because of the company worth you could be creating.
