“Do we have effective leadership?”
“Is our company vision and strategy aligned?”
“Does our company provide enough training to our employees?”
“Are we accomplishing our growth goals?”
“Are our meeting our customers’ needs?”
These tend to be some of the most commonly asked questions that I come across. Business leaders want to be sure that company resources are being appropriately directed at two things: motivating employees towards high performance and addressing customer needs. If you don’t have employees who are willing to sell and service a product, you can’t hope to meet customer expectations. And if customer needs are not being met, then your product is worthless. Unfortunately, what makes this more challenging is that any goalsetting involving human beings are not static. In other words, these are constantly moving targets, and as your employees and customers grow and develop, their expectations will constantly be adjusting, challenging businesses to keep asking “what do we need to change to make sure we get it right?”
But what does it take to get it right? Here are some initial thoughts:
Leadership. At any company, whether it’s public, private, for profit vs. non-profit, it’s the leaders who set the vision. Not only this, but leaders also embody the spirit and culture of a company. Leaders are the roots of the company. Their passion and energy nourish the body of a business, and it’s important that this is good nourishment, that helps a business flourish. Of course, it’s possible that leaders exude negative qualities, which serve to damage any part of the company they come across. If the collective qualities of leaders lean more towards the negative, your company is in trouble. However, good leaders consistently drive a company towards success.
Strategy. A company’s vision should be the foundation of its strategy. Strategies can change over time, for sure, and in fact they often do, but every firm needs this. Strategies and plans can get complicated, but when you boil it down to it’s simplest form, a strategy is essentially a glorified to-do list. For example, Google’s mission statement (their documented vision) is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This helps make sure their strategy is focused around their vision.
Employee commitment. This one is a bit more of a challenge, because it’s not necessarily recruiting employees that’s important, but it’s getting the right employees. The largest corporations are really just huge teams of people, and at the end of the day, if a team can’t work together, it’s really just a bunch of individuals competing against everyone else. So what does it take to keep employees working as a team? Honestly there are too many factors to list, because humans are incredibly diverse in their interests and desires. But to simplify just a little, employees care about the benefits companies offer, the culture they provide, and the impact they have on the world around them.
Customers. Businesses have a difficult relationship with consumers. On one hand, they need them. If customers don’t buy a firm’s products, the firm won’t continue to exist, regardless of how great the leaders are, how well-crafted the strategy is, and how wonderful the employees are. But remember one of those moving targets? Consumer trends are constantly shifting, due to the emergence of various technologies, trends, influencers, politics, and too many other factors to list. And as consumer attitudes change, companies must be able to adapt. Consider companies such as Kodak and Sears, who were once considered the behemoths of their industries, but it’s likely that generations of people will grow up and may never hear of these companies simply because customer attitudes shifted and these companies did not adapt.
So now we’ve identified these four areas where businesses have an opportunity to ‘get it right’. Unfortunately, there’s not one single combination that’s going to unlock every company’s potential and lead to explosive growth. The employees and customers that make up a business are incredibly complex, so an individual firm’s approach is going to look different. That being said, a number of thought leaders have offered advice that can help a company lock onto specific targets that will make finding it’s groove much easier. I’m going to highlight just a few of my favorites from some of the authors and professors I’ve learned from.
Leadership – get the right people on your bus. Laszlo Bock, former Google HR leader, wrote in his book “Work Rules!” that if you focus on getting the right people in your company, even if you don’t have a specific plan for what they’ll do, things have a way of working themselves out. If you bypass people whose passion and vision aligns in favor of pursuing specific candidates with proven results and skillsets, if they’re not a good fit, they could potentially be at odds with other leaders, or even with your company’s vision, which is effectively self-sabotage.
Strategy – As stated previously, strategy is informed by vision, but strategy is also driven by what’s going on in the external world. Business Professor Michael Bednar, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, shared that a strategy is a set of hypotheses which you use to create a desirable effect by manipulating factors you can control. But what can you control? Things like your budget (where your money comes from), your reward systems (who you pay and what you pay them for), and your processes. A successful business will put solid thought into leveraging its strengths to achieve goals, and will continue to test new hypotheses until one is found that consistently leads to positive results. And as consumer attitudes and the business environment changes, the firm will adapt new strategies.
Employees – Gregory Northcraft, Ph.D. in social psychology, taught me in one of his classes that employees are more likely to stay engaged if they have a stake in the business. That doesn’t just mean that sales affect their wages, but it means that the best companies consistently engage their employees. You want to improve your processes? Get your employees involved. You need to develop new products? Ask your people. In fact, many companies now have processes for employees to submit new ideas. If you’re not already seeking input from employees, you can easily increase engagement by starting to.
Customers – In 2019 I took a graduate class on Entrepreneurship. The professor was part of a startup incubator, and each class he brought in a different guest that was either a company founder, angel investor, or otherwise provided support to small companies that were trying to grow. One of the big themes that kept coming up as a challenge was finding a specific customer segment – a target market. And as I continued to explore different companies, it dawned on me that the greatest products are market towards a very specific customer. See, unless your product fulfills an actual ‘need’ (like a biological or social needs, for instance) than it must fulfill a ‘want’, and if you can determine what folks are most likely to want or need your product, you can develop a very specific strategy that will save you a bunch of time and energy trying to be everything to everyone. When I first heard this, it seemed obvious, but as I continued to research and work with different firms in various industries, it became clear that many people still struggle with this.
As stated before, finding the right combination of leadership, strategy, employees, and customers is not always an easy job, but it’s absolutely necessary to experiment with this early on in the life of your business. Your only other option is to learn down the road that your combination needs adjusting, and the longer you wait, the more costly and challenging those adjustments may be.
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