7 Unusual Ways to Improve Your Business Performance
Most advice on business performance covers familiar ground: better forecasting, tighter budgets, sharper strategy, new capex, upgraded software. All of it has a place. But businesses often stall for reasons that never show up on a dashboard, and those reasons usually involve people: how they are set goals, how they are judged, who they answer to, and what they can see of the business around them.
Here are seven less obvious ways to improve performance. Each one is about how you lead and organise people, and none needs a large budget.
1. Give the team one goal, and let them set it
Pick one measurable goal for a team, then ask the team to decide how to reach it and how to track it.
Take month-end close in a finance department. In many companies, closing the books takes three weeks, and everyone treats that as normal. In others it takes three days. The gap rarely comes from better software. It comes from a team that decided three days was the target and then worked out how to hit it.
Handing that goal down as an instruction rarely works. People comply, find reasons it can’t be done, and the old timeline returns within a quarter. Ask the team to set the target and design the process, and a few things change. They know where the delays are, because they sit in them every month. They know which reconciliations are done twice, which approvals sit in an inbox, and which reports nobody reads. They also own the result, so they have a reason to protect it.
The measurement matters too. Have the team track their own progress and report it themselves. A number you collect and present to them is your number. A number they collect is theirs.
Keep it to one goal. Teams given five priorities tend to treat all of them as optional. One clear target gives people something to rally around, and you can add a second goal once the first has become routine.
2. Consider stopping annual performance reviews
This one draws objections, so it is worth being specific. The problem is the format, not the idea of feedback.
The annual or twice-yearly review has weaknesses that most managers recognise. Some people take formal reviews badly and shut down or become defensive, so the conversation produces little useful information. Others perform well on paper because they write a good self-assessment, which tells you about their writing and not their work. And a review held months after an event is too late to change anything.
A formal review also teaches you little about how a person works. Who does well under pressure, and who needs space? Who wants a stretch target, and who is already at capacity? You learn these things by paying attention across the year, not through a form.
A workable replacement is frequent, short, informal conversations. Ask what is going well, what is getting in the way, and what they need from you. Keep notes. Over time you build a much clearer picture of each person than a yearly rating would give you, and you can tailor your approach to them. Some people respond to a deadline and some to encouragement, and you will only learn which by observing and asking.
If your organisation requires some formal record for legal or pay purposes, keep it, but make it a summary of conversations that already happened, not the first time anyone hears the feedback.
3. Be important and unimportant at the same time
A leader has to hold two positions at once. In one sense you carry more responsibility than anyone in the room: the decisions, the risk, and the outcome all land with you. In another sense you should matter very little to the daily work, because that work should run well without your involvement.
A useful picture is an upside-down triangle. Most organisation charts put the leader at the top with the weight of the business resting on those below. Turn it over, and the leader becomes the point at the bottom. Everyone else sits above you in the wide part of the shape, doing the work. You balance the whole structure on a very small base, and if you move wrongly, everything tips.
That image puts the pressure where it belongs. As the leader, you are there to carry weight and keep things balanced. When your team lacks a tool, a decision, or a clear priority, that is your problem to solve. When someone is struggling, your job is to notice and help before it affects the rest.
It also changes how you spend time. A leader who thinks of themselves as the top of a hierarchy tends to supervise. A leader at the point of the triangle tends to remove obstacles. The second approach scales much better as a business grows.
4. Put your attention on the people who touch the product
Every business has people whose hands are on the thing that customers pay for. They might be assembling it, coding it, cooking it, repairing it, or delivering the service. Whatever the business sells, a specific group of people turns effort into a product or service.
Everyone else in the organisation exists to help that group do the work. That includes finance, HR, IT, procurement, and management. These functions matter, but their value comes from how well they enable the people who produce.
You can see how a business has understood this by watching how the support functions behave. In a healthy company, a request from the shop floor or the front line gets a fast, helpful answer. In an unhealthy one, the front line spends its time satisfying internal processes: filling in forms, waiting for approvals, and justifying itself to people who have never seen the work.
When support functions forget their purpose, they become obstacles, usually without meaning to. A control that made sense in isolation adds a day to every order. A reporting requirement takes a skilled technician away from the work for two hours a week.
A practical step is to ask each support team a direct question: who do you serve, and how do you know you are helping them? Then ask the people doing the work the same question about those teams. The answers rarely match, and the mismatch tells you where time and money are being lost.
5. Map the whole business, start to finish
Most people understand their own part of a business well and the rest only roughly. That is normal, and it creates a problem: improvements made in one area often cause damage in another, and nobody notices because nobody sees the whole.
Set aside time to draw the business from beginning to end. Start with how a customer first hears about you, then follow the path through sales, order, production or delivery, invoicing, payment, and after-sales support. Mark every handover between people or teams. Mark where information is re-entered, where work waits, and where things go wrong.
Do it on a wall with sticky notes, or on a large sheet of paper, and include people from every function. The value lies partly in the finished map and partly in the conversations while you build it. People discover that the delay they blame on another department begins with something their own team does. They find tasks that exist only because of a problem fixed years ago. They see how their work feeds into the next team’s.
Keep the map somewhere visible and update it. It also keeps you from fixing a symptom. If invoices go out late, the cause may sit three steps earlier, in how orders are recorded. Without the full picture, you will spend effort in the wrong place.
6. Ask each team what they would stop doing
Businesses add work far more readily than they remove it. A report gets requested once and is then produced every week for years. A meeting is set up to solve a problem and carries on long after the problem is gone. A check is added after a mistake and never reviewed.
Over time, this accumulated work takes up a large share of everyone’s week. People rarely complain about it, because each item has a reason attached.
Ask every team to list three things they do that they think add little or no value, and then act on at least some of the lists. You will find reports nobody reads, approvals that are always granted, and duplicated effort between departments. Stopping them frees up time at no cost.
The exercise also shows people that you value their judgement. They know their own work better than you do, and being asked to prune it signals trust. If you cut something and it turns out to matter, someone will tell you quickly, and you can bring it back.
7. Put everyone in front of their customer
In many businesses, large parts of the workforce never meet or speak to the person who uses their work. Their output reaches that person eventually, but they see only an order number, a ticket, or a line in a spreadsheet.
That person is not always an outside buyer. For most people in a company, the customer is another department. Payroll is a customer of HR. Sales is a customer of marketing. The warehouse is a customer of procurement. Everyone has someone downstream who depends on what they hand over, and the quality of that handover shapes what the paying customer eventually gets.
Change how closely people see that. Arrange for people from every function to spend time with the people who receive their work, whether those people sit inside the business or outside it. That might mean sitting in on a sales call, shadowing a delivery, listening to support calls, or visiting a customer’s site. It might also mean a finance analyst spending an afternoon with the sales team who rely on their reports, or a developer sitting with the support staff who handle the complaints.
An analyst who watches a colleague rework a spreadsheet by hand every month because of a formatting problem will fix that problem. A developer who sees how people use the product will find priorities that no requirements document would have shown them. In both cases the person’s understanding of the work changes once they have seen who it serves.
This works for a simple reason: people make better decisions when they know who is affected by them. It also raises motivation. Work feels more worthwhile when you can see the person it serves.
You can start small. Ask each person to spend a few hours a quarter with someone who depends on their work, internal or external, and have them share what they learned with their team. Two questions are enough to start the conversation: what do you do with what I give you, and what would make it more useful?
Pulling it together
These seven ideas fit together. Teams set their own goals, leaders carry the pressure, the people who make the product are supported, and everyone can see the whole business and the customer at the end of it. Each idea moves responsibility and information closer to the people doing the work.
You don’t have to adopt all seven at once. Choose one that matches a problem you already have. If your month-end close drags, begin with idea one. If departments blame each other, begin with the map. If your support functions feel like a brake, begin with the question about who they serve.
Then watch what happens. The results usually show up in how people behave before they show up in the figures: faster decisions, fewer handoffs, and more willingness to raise problems early. The financial results follow from that.
Take it further
The seven ideas above all come down to one skill: leading people well. That is what the programme below teaches.
Leading High Performance Organisations
Executive Education | Ogilvie Business School
This two-day programme looks at the psychology of leadership, communication, organisational culture and high performance. It combines the science of leadership with real-world experience, so you leave with the confidence and capability to lead people, improve performance and build lasting organisational success.
If you recognised your own business in this article, whether that was a team without a clear goal, a support function that has lost sight of who it serves, or a leader carrying too much alone, this is a practical place to work on it.
Level: Executive Education, CPD certified
Duration: 2 days, 9am to 5pm each day including a networking dinner
Next dates: 13th to 14th January 2027, or 28th to 29th April 2027
Location: Dundee, Scotland
Investment: £1,275 plus VAT
