Predictable Success® Quizzes

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Quiz: Predictable Success Life Cycle

Take this simple quiz to discover what stage on the Predictable Success® lifecycle your organization is at.

Instructions: For each question below, select the answer which you think is most appropriate, then click the 'Submit' button at the bottom of the screen.

Note: For some questions you may find yourself forced to choose between two or more 'right' answers, or having to choose the 'least wrong' answer. This is deliberate: don't overthink it - go with your instinctive first reaction.


Question 1 What does your organization chart look like? Our org chart is pretty clear, and correctly identifies what we all do . We make changes as and when we need to. It's an effective, useful document and gets regular use. We've spent a lot of time on trying to design our org chart lately. It hasn't settled down yet, and seems to change every day! Are you crazy? An org chart isn't something we've even begun to think about. We don't need an org chart - everyone knows what's necessary to get the job done. As you would expect in an organization our size, our org chart is very complex. It is however clearly defined and only changes if there is a major overhaul. It's somewhat static, and a little out of date. We don't really use it very often.
Question 2 What is the main focus of your business right now? Asset management - we have cash reserves and lots of assets, so we look to ensure optimum ROI on our use of those assets. Cash, cash, cash - we need it to get off the ground and stay alive. Profit, profit, profit - we need to get our bottom line sorted out. We've got to the stage where sales alone isn't enough - we need profit, too. Sales, sales, sales - and boy, can we make sales! Cash, sales and profit - we have clear targets for each, and they're all equally important.
Question 3 How does the day-to-day decision-making process work? The boss decides what needs to be done, and tells whoever needs to know. Great question. These days, I'm not at all sure. I've tried delegating decision-making, but for one reason or another, it doesn't seem to be working. Mostly, cross-functional teams of people closest to the issue, make the day-to-day decisions. Senior managers help out as resources when required. We have healthy internal debate about important decisions that usually improves the quality of the final decision. A small group of us decides what needs to be done, and we tell whoever needs to know. We have a structured framework of policies, processes and meetings that generate day-to-day decisions. This can sometimes be a cumbersome and lengthy process, which doesn't always improve the quality of the final decision.
Question 4 How good are your managers at delegating? Delegation isn't something we need to do much of. We have people we could delegate to, but we're running so fast and keeping so busy, it's not really necessary. We really need to learn to do this. We don't delegate much, if at all, and it's causing bottlenecks. Our managers need to learn that this isn't like the old days, when they could do everything themselves - they need to learn to trust and involve others. Delegation is part of our management training and is included in performance assessment of our managers. However, everyone is pretty clear on their role, so the delegation is rarely spontaneous, it's usually more formal and structured. Delegate what? To who? We're a small team - we don't have anyone to delegate to! We're good at delegation - we couldn't produce the consistently good results we do, without effective delegation. Delegation happens spontaneously and frequently.
Question 5 Are your employees held accountable for results? Our folks mostly work in self-accountable teams, so people are very good at holding each other accountable. Managers also hold people accountable if necessary. Accountability is pretty immediate and effective, and helps us stay flexible and responsive to internal and external customers. While we have a structured system that theoretically puts in place accountability consequences for all activities, in reality, this is a big organization, and it's very easy to 'stay under the radar' if you want to. When it does take place, accountability is usually more medium-term and reward / punishment-related for the individual, rather than a short-term learning process for the organization. We seem to have almost completely lost the concept of accountability. Few people take responsibility or ownership of anything, and we have a lot of loose ends lying around. Attempts to hold people accountable usually turn into "pass the blame" session. Certainly as far as sales results and customer needs are concerned. Otherwise - I think it would be good for us to be more accountable, but frankly we're so busy we usually just rush on to the next thing. Sure. The boss sees everything that happens and personally holds everyone accountable.
Question 6 Where do your employee's loyalties primarily lie? Increasingly with no-one but themselves: I've watched many of our people move into CYA [Cover your a**] mode. With the organization: its product, services or brand. Very occasionally an employee will be loyal to their own manager, but we move people around to discourage that. With each other. Our employees understand that the key to success within the organization is to work together for the good of the company. This loyalty exists both vertically and horizontally within the organization. With the founder / owners personally. The customer: we do everything to make our customers happy.
Question 7 How strong is your corporate culture? Our culture is strong, but sometimes we run around like chickens with our heads cut off, trying to please the customer, which sometimes results in us losing sight of "the big picture". Our culture has fragmented, and we're lacking any strong sense of alignment. People don't have the same commitment they used to. It doesn't seem like 'fun ' anymore, and increasingly talk about how it was 'back in the day' It's intense, and built around the founder / owner group. Everyone is aligned around the same goal - to stay afloat! We have a formal mission and / or 'vision and values' statement. A lot of work was put into it, but I'm not sure how many people in the organization know about it or believe in it. Senior managers seem uncomfortable when they are required to discuss 'our culture'. It's great in principle, but not so widely practiced in reality. Our culture is clear, defined, and regularly reinforced by senior management. Team leaders underpin our vision and values by what they say and do. Our people understand what our culture is, and it helps them be happy and fulfilled at work.
Question 8 How much of a results focus do your people have? Everyone in the organization knows precisely how they as individuals contribute to our overall goals, and have a balanced focus on personal, team, divisional and organizational goals. We've lost our results-focus. Our people seem more occupied with activity levels than actual results. It doesn't help that we're struggling with how to measure results. Our people are hugely customer-focused - they do everything necessary to satisfy the customer. Desired results are agreed for the period in advance, and measured formally through our performance assessment process. We're best at measuring medium and long-term results, and not so good at assessing short-term results and staying light on our feet. Results mean one thing here - getting the business off the ground. Everyone knows that we have to keep the cash flowing, or we won't survive.
Question 9 As an organization, how good are you at hitting targets? Our key targets are top line revenue - sales. We focus intensely on achieving those goals. We develop targets from the bottom-up, involving all our key people, covering the whole P&L statement [revenues and costs], and we're pretty good at hitting those targets. We rarely seem to hit our targets these days - there always seems to be some excuse for over-promising and under-delivering. We need to get much better at budgeting and forecasting. We have a formalized, lengthy, top-down forecasting process that results in detailed budgets and targets that are communicated to our key employees - sometimes a little late, even into the next fiscal year. Our key target at present is staying alive - we don't set many other formal targets except finding the cash to stay afloat.
Question 10 What roles do teams play in your organization? The core of how we operate is through cross-functional teams - we make and implement most decisions this way. Very few people work in isolation or only with people from their own department. We have a formally matrixed organization were many employees with line managers also work in teams with separate team leaders. We structure career development to ensure key employees move around different functions and teams over time. Although we're big enough to be more than 'just one team', our folks still operate mostly as individuals. We're small enough that we are in essence just one team of people. We have split into functions [sales, admin, operations, etc.], but we work mostly in 'silos' - there is little or no cross-functional teamwork. There is some strife between the functions.
Question 11 How good are your employees at implementing decisions that are made? We do implement - eventually. However, we spend a lot of time checking with 'legal', 'marketing' etc. before something can get done. there are a lot of forms to fill out and policies to adhere to in order to get something implemented. Sometimes good decisions are never implemented because a pre-existing policy prevents it, which can be very frustrating. It depends on what the issue is - if it is to do with customers or sales, it gets done pretty immediately, otherwise it can be lost or forgotten about. We've become ineffectual at both making and implementing decisions. It's a struggle to get anything agreed, and when we do, there seems to be a hundred reasons why something cannot be done. We've tried implementing policies to standardize processes and help with implementing the decisions we make, but the policies rarely 'stick' Implementation is done by teams operating at the front line. They're responsive at implementing decisions and making adjustments if we don't get the right results. They have a sense of ownership that ignites their desire to see decisions effectively implemented. It's instantaneous - when we decide on something, we do it immediately without any debate or delay.
Question 12 How is hiring done in the organization? The founder/owners do most of the hiring themselves. Hiring takes a long time to do, disrupts our manager's time, and we often don't make good hires. Our managers hate doing it and aren't good at it. We seem to be doing much more of it lately. We hire using cross-functional teams and behavioral- and panel-based interviews. We know what we're looking for in our new employees and know how to find it. We hire a little ahead of our needs. We have a nice pipeline of unsolicited resumes. Hiring is done by hiring managers, assisted by HR, who act as a partner. When a hire is made, we're usually sure we've made the right choice. We have a hiring department that looks after all of that. They attend job fairs and such like. The line managers have relatively little involvement in the process. We're pretty much continuously hiring. The founder/owners are somewhat less involved in hiring - managers make the hire. Although the founder often sits in on the final interview.
Question 13 How do you assess your employee's performance? If they hit their sales targets, we're happy. We have a flexible performance assessment process that effectively measures personal, team, divisional and organizational performance. By and large, both the managers and employees enjoy and benefit from the process. The boss' observation: He/she is always right there and watch what they do. We have a very formalized, cumbersome performance assessment process. The managers and employees don't enjoy it, and it often seems irrelevant. HR polices the process and stand on manager's necks to get it done. We're at a stage where we need to do much more than just measure sales revenue, but we haven't really implemented a workable system yet. We need to be much quicker at spotting performance issues and rectifying them. Part of the problem is that our managers aren't trained in undertaking performance appraisals, and shy away from them.
Question 14 What is morale like amongst your employees? People are still fairly chipper to my face, but morale is probably worse than I see around me. I'm feeling a little out of touch compared to the old days, and I suspect our people aren't as happy as they used to be - they seem disengaged and more interested in watching their back than they used to. We're all aware that the business is still trying to get it's feet on the ground, but in spite of that, morale is still high. We have high morale, built on strong alignment around our organizational goals, strong team leadership and a high sense of personal fulfillment. Manager-employee relationships are strong, which has a big impact on morale. Morale is OK. We don't really get too passionate about such things. Most people seem relatively comfortable and content. We have occasional employee satisfaction surveys to assess those sort of things. If we took time to stop and think about it, it's probably high. However, we're too busy keeping customers happy to really consider the issue. Every now and again we go have a blow-out to celebrate a particularly good month.
Question 15 What level of employee turnover are you experiencing? We have controlled turnover - people do leave on occasion, but it's less and less because of poor performance, and more for 'life change' reasons. People rarely leave because they're dissatisfied, or unhappy with their managers. Employees tell me they stay 'because they feel at home'. We've got accustomed to employee turnover, and we're pretty good now at replacing people with them minimum of disruption. We try not to be too dependent on specific individuals. HR have a bunch of programs they use to try to minimize turnover, but they rarely have much permanent impact. If someone leaves it's usually a bit of a shock - we're a very small team, and I know everyone personally, so I'm surprised if anyone leaves. The level of employee turnover has recently begun to rise, in all parts of the organization. I can't really see a pattern, and it's hard to know what to do to staunch it. There's a lot of talk about how things were 'in the old days', and I sense our employees don't have the sense of 'fit' they used to have when they worked here. Some people are leaving just because they're tired by what they call 'ditch-to-ditch' management. People leave when they can't cut it - particularly if they can't hit their sales targets. Sometimes it's their decision, sometimes it's ours, but we're a hard-charging organization, and that's life: "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen". We do burn people out sometimes.
Question 16 What role do written policies and procedures play in your organization? We've got an effective system of policies and procedures, that most everybody is happy with. It took us a while to get there, but everything works pretty smoothly. We make regular amendments as necessary. Sheesh...sometimes I think we're ruled by policies and procedures. It seems almost impossible to get anything done around here without getting 5 forms signed in triplicate...We're a big organization, so I guess it's natural we should almost be ruled by policies and procedures. We have some guidelines regarding sales - customer discounts, things like that, but not much else. Hah! If I see anyone type a memo, I'll kill them :) - seriously, we don't have time, or a need for that sort of thing - we just do what needs to be done. We're struggling to introduce much-needed policies and procedures to help 'steady the ship'. We grew so fast in the past, that we left very few systems behind us. Now's the time to rectify that, but it's a difficult challenge to get the new policies accepted and acted upon. It's made some of the old-timers very unhappy.

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