Chamber Leadership: sustainability

Showing posts with label sustainability. Show all posts

Using Data to Grow and Sustain Your Organization

What tools are you using to collect data on your members and nonmembers to grow your organizations?

Data is a powerful tool that can be used to grow and sustain your organization.

By collecting and analyzing data, you can gain insights into your customers, your competitors, and your own operations.

This information can then be used to make better decisions, improve your products and services, and grow your business.

Here are some of the ways that you can use data to grow and sustain your organization:

Understand your customers: Data can help you to understand your customers better, including their needs, wants, and behaviors. This information can then be used to improve your products and services, target your marketing campaigns, and provide better customer service.

Identify trends: Data can help you to identify trends in your industry, including changes in customer behavior, new technologies, and emerging markets. This information can then be used to adapt your business to the changing landscape.

Improve your operations: Data can help you to identify areas where your operations can be improved, such as reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and improving quality. This information can then be used to make changes that will improve your bottom line.

Make better decisions: Data can help you to make better decisions about your business, such as which products to launch, which marketing campaigns to run, and how to allocate resources. This information can then be used to improve your chances of success.

By using data effectively, you can grow and sustain your organization in the long term.
Here are some additional tips for using data to grow and sustain your organization:

Collect the right data: The data that you collect should be relevant to your business goals. You should also collect data from a variety of sources, such as your website, your customer interactions, and your internal systems.

Analyze the data: Once you have collected the data, you need to analyze it to identify trends and insights. This can be done using a variety of tools and techniques, such as data visualization and statistical analysis.

Use the data to make decisions: The data that you have analyzed should be used to make decisions about your business. This includes decisions about your products, services, marketing, and operations.

Act on the data: Once you have made decisions, you need to act on them. This means implementing changes to your business that will improve your performance.

Use data to grow and sustain your organization for sustainable growth.

Designing Strategy for Sustainability

The following blog post are my notes from a recent webinar I attended sponsored by Institute for Organization Management with Dr. Steve Swafford and Dr. Jill McCrory of Leadership Outfitters.

The session was focused on designing a strategy for sustainability for yourself, staff, leadership/volunteers and organization.

They started out by asking the question, what is your chamber’s greatest strength? The sample of responses from participants:

Storytelling
Mission minded
Advocacy
Relationships
Communication
Community builder

Then they turned and led a discussion on focusing on strengths.

Yourself – pay attention to yourself because the team is paying attention to you.

Staff – identify your staff’s strengths through Clifton or other aptitude tests, do some team assessment and get the right people in the right seats.

Leadership/Volunteers – what are the leaders best at? What are their aspirations?

Organization – do you have a clear vision and mission? Where are you going, why? Do you have clear achievable goals? How will you get there?

They then talked about the SOAR Framework, a twist on the SWOT analysis, that most folks are familiar with, and how you should look at your staff leadership and organization through this SOAR lens as a tool to maximize performance in the areas mentioned above.

Strengths – what do you do well? What are you excellent at?

Opportunities – what are the opportunities here? Even those not in your control.

Aspirations – what do you aspire to become or do?

Results – what are the measurable results and outcomes?

To me, the SOAR Framework is very much like the Hedgehog Theory in the book Good to Great – which asks the following three questions:

What do you have passion for?
What are you the best at or can you be the best at?
Where do you make money?

Where those three intersect, that is the business you should be in.

They also talked about strategic leadership and the three components they feel make up that process – strategic thinking, strategic acting, strategic influencing. What possibilities can you see? Maximize your strengths.

They pivoted to address the question, what’s coming down the track – change catalysts?

They have identified four big areas that organizations are dealing with - you don’t want to get hit by the train! The key is to be proactive before you see the trains light. You need to anticipate what’s on the horizon for your organization in these areas.