Improve Company Performance with 5 Star Points Model Approach

How well does your company achieve your strategic goals? Meeting and overcoming crises?

One approach to assessing your company’s readiness is to apply a 5 Star Points model, which looks at the business from five perspectives, all centered on strategy.

To get started, draw a star on a sheet of paper. In the center, write “Strategy.” Next ask yourself the following questions:

• How well-defined is your strategy?
• Who is your audience?
• Has the recession and the work force generational shift affected it?
• Have you identified three to five goals with initiatives to support them?
• Does every person in the company understand how they relate to the strategy?

Your answers to these questions will give you an idea of where to start when creating your own 5 Start Points Model.

How to Use the 5 Star Points Model

The 5 Star Points assess how well the business performs toward achieving the strategy goals. So what are the 5 points?

The Star Model: 5 Points

1. To create and sell a product or service, the company must have processes. These provide consistency at the high level, but should be adaptable and flexible where distinction is needed. Many companies fail to continue improving processes without proceduralizing them. Processes should not be cookbooks — they should be key steps or checkpoints to ensure quality and efficiency still support innovation and improvement.
2. The personalities, skills, and competencies you hire are your business. They provide it the “humaneness” that creates new ideas and approaches, and ultimately the face of the company. So many businesses have tried to drive out this factor through processes and procedures, with little to no success. Accept that people are different, and that this is a strength rather than an issue.
3. How you organize your people to support your processes may change, based on the situation or strategy. Currently, most companies seek to “flatten” the organization, reducing the number of levels between the front line worker and the executive.
4. What the organization uses — tools, software, and hardware — to accomplish its work. Often, management seeks the “silver bullet” tool that will fix all of its problems, but actually this is a fundamental mistake — and usually an expensive one. Tools enable the people, organization, and processes. If those areas have issues, then tools only make them worse over time. Do your tools support good processes? The team members’ roles? The organization? If not, challenge their usefulness.
5. What does the company stand for? Why would someone want to work for it? Culture has been out of sight to many executives until recently—mainly due to the trend of driving out risk and uniqueness through proceduralization. But culture is back in full force; and the younger workers are choosing companies based on it. Its focus on values, principles, and social relations can keep your company intact and strengthen in tough times. Without it, a job is just a paycheck.

Where you see areas for opportunity, engage your team to determine how to address them. This will strengthen your company and prepare it for the future.

To talk with someone from The Persimmon Group about how the 5 Star Points Model could increase your company’s productivity, contact us today.