How to assess your 7 levels of business effectiveness

The seven levels of business effectiveness represent the core areas that a business leader should focus on in order to do better in business.  Importantly, they should be considered from the top of the pyramid down as they are connected and interact with each other.

Unfortunately for you, when your effectiveness at any of these levels is suboptimal, they become the seven levels of business blocker.

When a higher level of effectiveness is suboptimal and represents a blocker, there is a material risk that the lower levels of effectiveness will be misaligned or misdirected and so the business or project will fail. It’s essentially a case of the blind leading the blind.

As an example, if you’re not fully clear about the emotional needs your customers really want you to solve, you’re likely to apply creativity to the wrong problems and create unwanted or misguided solutions. Equally, the long-term plans of action – strategies – to deliver those solutions in the competitive market place are then likely to be incorrectly set as they’re based on false assumptions.

When a lower level of effectiveness is suboptimal you normally experience a failure of execution or implementation. For example, if your leadership skills are ineffective then even well aligned customer needs, solutions to solve the needs and plans of action to deliver competitively are thwarted when you fail to communicate, facilitate change and create an execution culture as a leader.

Most businesses fail to fulfil their potential because the biggest blocker is at the top of the pyramid: YOU. You need to start with your personal effectiveness to avoid everything being blocked.

There are simple steps to assess your 7 levels of business effectiveness:

1. Break down the question: in simple terms, when you look at the levels of effectiveness above, do you even know what makes up management effectiveness or what it means to be effective in sales and marketing? Break down the question even further. Think about what these levels mean for your business. Try and think of someone who epitomises a high level of effectiveness in a certain area. What do they say and do? How do they appear to think about things?
2. Ask yourself the question: how do you then rate yourself against the 7 levels of business effectiveness? Think about times when you can say that you have evidenced the behaviours you’d expect to see a highly effective leader to exhibit. Imagine what other people would say about you if they had to rate your abilities against each of the 7 levels.
3. Ask other people: take your interpretation of what the 7 levels of effectiveness mean to you and share them with other people. Ask them to rate you based on what they have seen you say and do. It can’t be a gut based thing. Ask them to base it on behaviours they have seen you exhibit.
4. Take a test: there are numerous skills tests in the market that you can use to assess your leadership skills. The important thing to focus on is how your skills relate to the areas you need to be effective within your business. Free Leadership skills tools can be used to map your leadership skills to the seven levels of business effectiveness to allow you to see what skills you need to develop to become more effective and why that matters in terms of unblocking other levels of business effectiveness.
5. Use a business coaching service: good business coaching services are focused on getting you and the rest of your senior team to fulfil the potential that your business has to excel in its markets. This necessitates evaluation of these seven levels of business effectiveness and the application of coaching interventions to improve performance in the areas of weakness.

The seven levels of business effectiveness represent the core areas that you as leader should focus on in order to do better in business.  Don’t ever forget that your own personal effectiveness is often the biggest blocker of business success. Do something about it.

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