Systems help establish what needs to be done by employees with little to no input from the business owner.  Organizational systems allow employees to do excellent work on a consistent basis and know how you’d want it done.

Lack of systems and training is really what drives employees to do poor work, not poor employees.

Most companies are running so fast executing the business, they don’t have the time to stop and work on setting up a more efficient system to execute.  It’s important to work ON your business, not IN your business.  Before you can start doing anything else, the first step you have to take is to stop something you’re currently doing.  Whether that something is surfing the web, checking email, servicing customers or paying bills, you have to stop doing something before you can start doing something else.  So the first thing you’re going to have to figure out is, what are you going to stop?

Where are you going to find the time to work on systems and processes? 

Think of your time as leverageable – a few minutes of YOUR time can direct other people to do hours worth of work.  You have to find the time available for you to come up with the system of what you want you done and how you want it done, so you can translate that into execution by your employees.

Business owners tend to have a lot of unconscious competence – We know what we do, how we do it, why we do it, but we don’t really have it in a way that we can necessarily teach it to other people.  We usually say “Watch me, then go do it.”  As we have talked about before, that’s not the best way – poor training and poor systems are more to blame for poor work than are poor employees.

Unconscious competence needs to be mapped out.  Take some of the time you’ve cleared away to sit down and go through the step-by-step of doing the processes and write down what you’ve done as you’re doing it.  You need to develop a good training/teaching system or process to build “unconscious competence” in your employees so they will do their best work without constant direction.