Four Steps Towards Better Intuition in your Business
Do you have intuition? Or do you think you do? Do you just wing it or do you have a process for it? Well, let’s take a few minutes to find out if you truly do.
Good afternoon friends, Thomas Joyner with Business On Purpose here.
This past weekend, our entire team flew up to Franklin, Tennessee to celebrate the opening of a new BoP location in Middle Tennessee. True to our colors we spent time going over the vision, the mission, the core values and then spent the better part of the afternoon being taught by our own team members in ways that they are strong.
It was an incredibly powerful time to be together, to halt coaching for a day and reinvest back into our team. If you’re not doing something like this, I can’t encourage you enough to invest the time and resources to do so. We all have a little spring in our step this morning and are excited to be a part of this team.
One of our coaches asked us this question and the teaching from it was so powerful for me. He asked us if we have intuition. We all kind of raised our hands as we were like, “Of course, we wouldn’t have been hired to do this if we didn’t have some decent sense of intuition.”
But he didn’t stop there. Most self-aware and healthy individuals have some sense of intuition. They can typically take a problem and drill down to what’s underneath. However, most of us stop a few steps short of actually fixing it, so we end up repeating our mistakes over and over again.
We walked through this “Intuition Process” as I coined it for my own memory, to never forget the 4 steps.
So what are the 4 steps? Let’s dive in and talk about it.
The first thing we must do is wrap our arms around the problem. Asking simple questions to figure out what the dilemma is. Is it personnel-driven, a problem with a product or service, or maybe a client? I don’t know... but it’s asking enough questions to wrap your mind around the problem you’re facing.
The second thing we need to do is drill down and ask, “What’s the root of the problem or what’s the real issue?” I injured my back a few months back working out. I went to a physical therapist as I could barely walk and they asked me a series of questions. I pointed to where it hurt and how I injured it and they told me it was a problem with my glute muscles.
“No, the pain is right here,” I kind of said as I pointed to a spot 6-8’’ above where they were telling them the problem was.
I’ll never forget what the PT person said. “Oftentimes where it hurts is not the problem. That’s just where the problem is rearing its ugly head!” Man, that is so true. Often times the problem is not what you see or feel, but a failure somewhere else along the line and this is just where it manifests itself.
So, as you’re asking questions, what is the root of the problem? What created it? A breakdown in communication? Overlooking something in a hiring process? Maybe it was training-related? But find out what the real issue is!
Third, ask “What’s the action to take?’’ Now, this can be tough. Rarely are actions black and white, but most are somewhere in the gray spectrum. So, with the information we have, what is the action we need to take? This can take some time to discuss, but there should be an action to take.
Now, this is where most people stop. And it’s natural to stop here. We fixed the problem, rooted it out, and took action. But if you stop here, you’re bound to repeat your mistake! You’ve got to take one more step.
That step is what Process do we need to build or tweak to prevent this from happening again! That’s powerful stuff right there. What do we need to put in place to make sure this root issue is solved! Think how freed up your business would be if you built a process every time something went wrong to insure that it never happened again!
For one, you would probably have a whole lot less mistakes every single day.
So, what does this look like in the real world? Let me walk you through an example.
We work with a client who hired a new salesperson. A few months in they just weren’t getting the hang of it. We tried more training, we tried encouragement, we tried everything we could to get their performance up and it just wasn’t happening. In fact, they were well below their peers who had been selling way less time than this new employee.
So we began to work this Intuition Process. We knew the problem. This employee was not getting close to meeting sales quota. As we drilled down a bit, we realized that the problem was NOT the employee. We realized that there were some assumptions made in the hiring process. This person should have never been hired for this role in the first place. They were just not a salesperson, but much more of a support role type.
So, the owner took responsibility for that and realized we had to take action. We put some metrics for the employee to reach to be able to continue in the sales role. There were other roles they could fill, but they couldn’t be paid to produce without actually producing.
Lastly, we spent time figuring out what are the holes in the hiring process that need to be fixed in order to prevent this from happening again? We built a new hiring process with new ways to test salesmen on their effectiveness before they are hired!
Here’s the thing. There will be mistakes. Always. We’re managing human beings who make mistakes and that is ok. But... what we can do is build processes that help eliminate as many of those as possible. We can do our part to make sure the process is in place to prevent the same mistakes from happening twice.
So, take this and use it in your business. Figure out the problem, drill down to the root of it, find the action to take, and then build a process to prevent it from happening again!
That’s some good stuff right there and I hope you enjoyed it! Make sure to subscribe to our podcast and youtube channel so you never have to come and download our episodes. We want them waiting on you every time we add a new one. Don’t want you to miss a thing!
Have a great week!
