On the face of it, the phrase "being more effective" should be easy to understand. Some will interpret it as doing more things in the limited time they have or achieving something at a cheaper cost than originally anticipated or even achieving that thing whilst impacting fewer people.
Considering that I built a whole business based on 'helping others be more effective today than they were yesterday' then you'd think I'd have a clear definition but here's the thing: I don't.
For once, however, this isn't about my flippant quote: "Take my advice, don't take my advice!" It's because a true definition of effectiveness can only come from the person or business that it relates to. It's very essence is defined by them: their strategy, their goals and their set of principles to which they aim to achieve this.
Imagine you set yourself a personal goal of losing weight by a set date through a strategy of doing more exercise with some principles of not spending too much money and not giving up too much free time to achieve it. With this in mind, effectiveness could mean achieving a greater weight loss than originally planned or achieving it within a shorter time period and doing it at no additional cost whatsoever (i.e. no expensive gym fees).
So, if the definition is unique to each business, how then can Shiageto Consulting help?
[Great question, thanks for asking - he says]
Well, we offer help in two specific areas: 1) Direct effectiveness and 2) Indirect/long-term effectiveness
1) Direct Effectiveness
The first area is all about helping directly with your vision, strategy or goals.
We start off by making sure you know exactly what it is you want to achieve. You'll be amazed just how many businesses and individuals don't have this clearly thought through but instead just get busy doing stuff. If you haven't done this yet then we can help you define your vision, your strategy and your objectives. As part of this, we can help you really test if it's the right thing to be aiming for and what hurdles you might have to overcome to achieve it.
Even if you do know what you want to achieve, often this isn't clear to others. In this case we help you be more effective by helping you work out:
who needs to understand it and what they currently think about it,
what the best way to communicate it is,
who might be opposed to you achieving it and
what other barriers currently exist in the way you operate that might make it more difficult to achieve (a major area here is identifying if you have too many competing demands).
If you can get all these elements in place then you are a long way on the road to effectiveness :)
2) Indirect/Long-term Effectiveness
Whilst it is important to have all aspects of your vision, strategy and goals as effective as possible, how you execute against it is just as important.
The other side of how Shiageto helps organisations and individuals improve their effectiveness is to improve the skills they will use day-to-day to get where they want to get to. If you think about it, these are the personal skills we all carry and if we can get them to be a little better then everything will run much smoother.
This is why Shiageto provides support in improving:
Analytical thinking and structured problem-solving skills
Communication and storytelling skills
Influencing and negotiation skills
Strategic tools and creativity skills
Feedback and coaching skills
Self awareness and unconscious bias assessments
Team and culture assessments
Team-building and change adoption
Phew! That's a lot of stuff. It is, that's true, but improve these and you will be a superhero.
When you look over the list of things above you'll see that each area of our support is designed to help with IQ (having the ability to come up with the best solutions), EQ (having the ability to bring others with you) or FQ (having the ability to focus and be efficient in delivering the solution). This genuinely applies to every business, every team and every individual so we hope it resonates with you.
Why might you need external support in this?
There are three main reasons why having external support will help you become more effective:
An external viewpoint; sometimes it's just hard to see where you could be doing better. Like hiring a coach at the gym; an external, independent individual can see things that you might miss, keep you honest and can be a conduit for even greater improvement
Additional bandwidth; sometimes you just need more focus and time to move things along rather than doing them as an additional activity. By hiring external support, they can take this on and make sure you get there
Experience and creativity; it can seem really hard to make improvements in some of these areas but having people that have been there and done that to guide you can be invaluable
At Shiageto, we have a lot of experience and we get such a buzz helping with all this that everyone at Shiageto is good at this and our support helps unlock value for all our clients. If you want to know more, why not drop me a line and let's explore together what we can achieve.
Footnote: Incidentally, instead of effectiveness, we could have chosen a different vision for Shiageto. I was advised to go with 'helping others be more successful' instead of 'helping others be more effective' but success can imply something binary and conveys a finality whereas effectiveness is about continuous improvement and embodies much more the values we feel passionate about around learning, collaboration and empathy for all.
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