Mike Tyson is quoted as saying, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
A punch in the mouth at work comes in the form of things like system crashes; illnesses; lack of follow through; mistakes, even natural disasters. Here are three reasons why it’s crucial to know your processes:
• Compliance with regulatory agencies
• Business continuity
• Operational Excellence
Let’s start with the compliance issue: you can be the greatest manager in the world in terms of record-breaking performance and sky-high morale, but if you broke the rules in the process, all that great work you did is for nothing. You need to know your processes to ensure your work is compliant with governing bodies.
Flu epidemics; vacations; unexpected absences, and natural disasters can disrupt business continuity. You must to know your processes so you can maintain efficiency and synergy in times when you need to bridge a gap in staffing.
And speaking of maintaining efficiency, change is constant in business. Innovation; new tools; and system reconfigurations often invite or even necessitate a process change. It’s crucial that you know your processes in order to maintain operational excellence and stay up to date on best practices.
Hand-in-hand with knowing your processes is to document them. Key processes should be flow-charted. Control points, known as key controls, should be marked.
You may leverage your current position as an individual contributor into a management position in a different business unit than the one in which you currently work. What’s the most efficient way to learn the processes of a department of which you are unfamiliar? Especially if you’re a kinesthetic learner like me; we learn by doing, so simply reviewing a flow chart is not going be sufficient because we won’t retain enough of the information.
Any reports that require your signature, you need to have the preparer walk you through their process. Review the supporting documentation. That should add a degree of clarity to the flow charts.
Also, don’t wait for the auditors to ding you for operational errors. You can be proactive and perform your own audit. Get comfort that not only do you know your processes, they are also being done correctly.
See the next slide in this presentation for a summary of this discussion. Prepare to succeed!