Have you identified the “Systems Champion” on your team? It’s a pretty important role that’s often overlooked. The Systems Champion is a person on your team who keeps your processes front and centre, and helps build a systems culture within your organisation.
Like Sales, Marketing, Operations, Finance, and HR… think of your systems like any other department and the “Systems Champion” is the department head for your “Systems Department”. Thinking of it this way ensures you give your systems the respect they deserve!
Remember, systems and processes allow you to delegate more tasks to less skilled team members – thereby freeing your top performers to focus on higher-value tasks, which increases efficiency and scalability.
Therefore, the sooner you find your Systems Champion, the sooner you can take it to the next level.
Timestamps:
00:20 – Some truths about business systems
00:37 – Enabling higher skilled team members to delegate tasks
00:51 – A range of benefits from systemising your business
01:08 – How a systems champion can affect change
01:26 – Skills and attributes to look for
01:42 – Recruiting your Systems Champion
01:55 – Think about systems as a department
02:17 – Case study – Alison Rogers
02:53 – Action items for hiring a Systems Champion
03:28 – When is the best time to start
Formatted Transcription:
Hello. In this video we’re going to be talking about the role of the systems champion, which is arguably one of the most important yet overlooked positions in all of business. So I’m going to shine a spotlight on this because I know the tremendous impact it can have on your business. And I want to cover a few things we’ll talk about. Well, what is a systems champion? Why do you need one? How do you find one and when should you get one into place?
But let’s start off with some truths about business systems. I don’t think I’ve ever had a discussion with a business owner where we haven’t reached the conclusion that business systems aren’t important. Of course, they’re important. All great businesses have systems and processes in place. It’s a way to capture and codify your best practice. It enables your highest skilled team members to delegate tasks down through systems and processes to ensure those tasks are completed to a high standard by a less skilled team member, which thereby frees them up to work on their highest value tasks. And there’s a whole range of benefits that come from systemizing your business. So we know how important it is. Yet most business owners keep putting it off. They don’t see themselves as a systems person, they don’t think they’re the right person to document it, and they’re not too sure who to give it to because everybody on their team is quite busy.
This is where the idea of a systems champion comes into place. And it’s so important that it’s going to be the topic of my next book because I think every business needs a systems champion. So a systems champion and I do share a position description, which I’ll link to in another video, to know what it’s all about and what are the skills and attributes to look for. But it’s basically just someone on your team who can keep systems front and center and help to build a systems culture.
Now, this role initially might start out as a shared role. Maybe it’s someone on your team who’s naturally organized and you can say, great, this is part of your roles and responsibilities sometimes. **And at some point you really want to recruit someone
specifically for that role.** And here’s how we think about it. At SYSTEMology, if you think about your business and the different departments in your business, so Sales, Marketing, Operations, Finance, HR, you’ll notice we consider the systems area a department in and of itself. So just like you would have department heads, you’d have a sales department head, a Marketing department head, Operations, Finance, you would have heads of each of these different departments. You would have a head of systems. This is effectively your systems champion and this is the way to think about it because you want someone to take responsibility for that.
Now, when you think about how are you going to find one, I’m going to draw upon an interview that I just recently had with one of our clients, Alison Rogers from Vocal Maneuvers, and we shared with her the position description that I’m sharing with you and also a job ad that we gave her. And she just said, I swiped it completely and just changed SYSTEMology for my business, and it snagged me the most incredible systems champion. And that was a game changer. Allison was quite lucky. She found someone who had already read SYSTEMology. It was a virtual assistant paced out of the Philippines who had read SYSTEMology.
Once you identify that person, you then want to give them some action steps to go through. We get them to document and help to get into place the critical client flow. We talk about minimum viable systems in some of our programs, and you want the Systems Champion to help you reach minimum viable systems and focus on building the culture in the organization that might be just keeping it front and center and building up enough habits that we then start to change the way that your business works. And these are kind of some things you want to consider as you get this into place.
Now, when is the best time to do this? Well, the best time to start was probably last year or the year before, but the next best time is now. The best time to start is always now. Because the longer you put it off, the harder it’s going to be to get that systems culture in place and the more you’re going to be struggling to keep up with your competition. So I hope that you’ll take this on board and consider getting a systems champion in place in your business.
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