Assessing Your Resources

To secure an immediate snapshot of your in-house resources and gaps, I recommend you expand on the alignment chart model by adding two additional columns and proceeding as follows:

Label the column to the immediate right of the TCSP Needed column: Have.

Label the column to the immediate right of the Have column: Gap.

In the Have column, list all the talents, capabilities, skills, and passions possessed by the members of that team, whether they are relevant to the teams goals or not.

In the Gap column, list all of the talents, capabilities, skills, and passions the team needs but lacks.

Exhibit 13.4 shows you an example of what the outcome might look like for the sales organization first introduced in Exhibit 13.2. According to this, their weaknesses are in the areas of accounting and financial acumen. It also reveals that some of the sales people have niche branding skills. Perhaps the company can train the sales team in accounting and financial skills

COMPANY OBJECTIVES

5 percent increase in market share

30 percent gross margin (up 3 percent)

10 percent increase in overall revenue

Establish niche brand value

Increase new business 5 percent

Close only high margin business

Go deeper into clients (combined with new clients results in 10 percent revenue increase)

Gain trusted advisor status

TCSP NEEDED

Prospecting

Accounting/ financial acumen

Relationship building

Articulate

Outgoing

Energetic

A high level of knowledge about our services and best practices

Prospecting

Relationship building

Articulate

Outgoing

Energetic

A high level of knowledge about our services and best practices

Niche branding skills

Accounting/ financial acumen

Exhibit 13.4 Expanded Alignment Chart for a Sales Professional

TEAM

GOALS

HAVE

and engage the team members with niche branding skills in the development of marketing plans (assuming they have the bandwidth for this work).

Knowing what you need to meet your objectives and who in your organization has the talents, capabilities, skills, and passion components are two of the three basic ingredients needed to effectively manage your workforce. The third is effective utilization, which refers to the degree that you are consuming the available talents, capabilities, skills, and passion of the resources in your organization, specifically the billable resources. Before we begin to explore the most effective ways for you to manage your aggregate billable resources, however, it is important that we first examine the area of individual sustainable workloads.

Determine the Optimal Level of Individual Resource Utilization

Two of the most common utilization mistakes are under- and overutilizing individuals. In the former, your company operates at suboptimal capacity because your resources are not being used as fully as possible. In the latter, you are also, surprisingly enough, still operating at suboptimal capacity because some of your people are at, or close to, burnout and they are performing at less then peak levels. Lets examine these two challenges more closely and then discuss what we can do to create a balance in utilization that ensures you will draw the best sustainable level of optimal output from your employees.

Underutilization

Individual underutilization occurs when you are unaware of what it takes to perform the steps in various processes and end up providing people with roles that contain a great deal of slack. With the exception of a few hardy and self-motivated souls, this slack time is often filled with other low-value activities. Some underutilized individuals also feel unappreciated as a result of being underchallenged.

Several years ago, I interviewed a number of people in a financial services company as part of an outsourcing program transition. The company had just outsourced much of their IT organization, and the outsourcing company wanted to know what these people did for the client in order to determine how to fill these needs. To my surprise, a number of them worked in shifts babysitting a data communication console. Their sole job was to call a technician if the third light from the right on the second row of the console turned red. This happened perhaps once or twice per month. (For the balance of the time, they sat there and read paperback novels, according to the local gossip.)

Overutilization

The flip side of the individual underutilization coin is overutilization. Overutilization occurs when a person in your organization, usually one who is highly talented and able to engage in various revenue-generating projects, is overextended. The results of being overextended for a prolonged period of time are disengagement, where the person starts caring less and less about the quality of his or her work and, in time, outright burnout.

Sometimes companies take the position that disengagement and burnout are personal problems that suffering employees need to handle. According to noted experts, however, such as Dr. Michael Leiter, coauthor of the book The Truth About Burnout, lack of a balanced resource utilization practice in todays workplace is the chief cause of burnout, which, in turn, costs these companies billions in lost revenue opportunities. In todays workplace, states Dr. Leiter, organizations are responding to the challenges of global competition, tightening budgets and downsizing by making people work harder instead of smarter resulting in the exhaustion, cynicism and ineffectiveness characteristic of burnout. 5 The fact is that overextending people or overutilizing does not increase real productivity as measured in results over the long run.

When it comes to dealing with burnout and stress, much of the advice we hear or read focuses on how managers can help people cope with the stressors. These techniques are useful and come in handy as temporary symptom relievers, but, unfortunately, they do not position or fortify people to reach real higher levels of performance nor do they address the larger company problems. Simply treating the symptoms of burnout is like giving someone a medicine that provides temporary relief from the external signs of a cold. After the relief medication wears off, the person is still sick and operating at less than optimal levels. Likewise, after these temporary relief solutions, people are still disengaged and performing at less than peak levels. The real solution, states Leiter, to enabling people to effectively respond to the increase in demands will come from organizations and individuals significantly re-thinking the way people work and effectively managing work. 6 By taking this advice seriously, we create environments that support true peak performance as measured by business results instead of the frenzied busy work and late nights that mask the diminishing returns of people who are not producing at optimal levels of performance.

Given that we now have a good picture of the impact and causes of under-and overutilization, the question is: What can you do to strike a balance and achieve optimal individual utilization?

Optimizing Utilization of Firm Resources

The key to successfully driving individual optimal results is to secure a clear understanding of the work requirements and to set standard expectations