Not the classic week or two that follows the wedding, rather that brief period of bliss after you move into a new, higher level management position. That period where everyone works at their hardest and are completely supportive of your style and direction. Unfortunately, unless you act decisively and immediately, it will melt away faster than an ice cube in St. Louis in August. Fortunately you don t have to wait until you get promoted to a higher-level position to take steps to enhance company operations and profits.
What am I talking about? The need to establish a direction for the company, the department, and your new team. In a past issue we talked about the fact that visions enliven while strategies support and that is a starting point to keep the honeymoon going forever.
WorldatWork (the former American Compensation Association) recently reported that 80% of companies with "engaged" employees produced operating results that exceeded all three of the stock indices averages. These companies exceeded the average performance of all of the companies that make up the Standard & Poor 500 Index, the NASDAC Composite, and the Dow Journal Industrial Average. I think that says a lot because I understand that those indexes generally select the better performers to include in their data mix.
So, I ve apparently laid out two different concepts for your consideration - defined direction and employee involvement. I don t want to force you to choose; rather, I would like you to think about how these two ideas can be combined to maximize the results.
The first step in a process is to decide IF you want to change. If you are totally satisfied with your sales volume, margin, profit, expenses, and employee performance then why change? Unfortunately, nothing ever stays the same so even if you are totally satisfied with today s results you can be assured that the situation will change tomorrow. What will your competition do to impact your operation? What will you have to do to react to their action and regain your superior position? I think that says that you can t be satisfied with your position. Obviously for some the changes won t come tomorrow, but invariably they will come.
Assuming that moving forward is critical how should you begin? After deciding that you want to, or need to, change that next step is to define exactly where you are today. What is your product or service? How do you deliver it to the market? Is your market changing? What has the competition been doing? What do you think they are planning to do? What are your employees beliefs and feelings about the company - about your management style?
Having honestly and precisely defined exactly where you are today, the next step is to decide what you want the company to be - paint a detailed picture of the ideal future state for your business. What do you want the company to "look like" when it reaches the next level of success? With the starting point and the end point defined you can now start on the difficult task of creating positive change.
The classic strategy process includes a SWOT analysis - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Is your company the leader in technology, market share, cost effectiveness, or? Where could you be better - inventory control, delivery times, customer service, or? What opportunities exist - can you buy out your closest competitor and really strengthen your market position, offshore, partner, or? Are you being challenged by lower cost producers, offshore competitors, changing technology, changing markets, or?
After completing the SWOT analysis you will be in a good position to decide what your business will be or will become. I have been told, and I assume the information is accurate, that Southwestern Bell (SBC) has decided that it will become the communications and information resource for everyone in their service area. No longer will they be just the local exchange carrier or local dial-tone provider - their sights are set much higher. In support of this information, I just heard an advertisement where SBC is offering savings by bundling your local wire-line service with long-distance service, cellular service, high speed data access, satellite TV, and programming on demand.
Does this convey a clear vision of what Mr. Whitacre sees SBC becoming? If you are a cable provider is this a meaningful Threat? Apparently some of the local cable providers have also completed their SWOT analysis because I have seen advertisements from them for high-speed access, video-on-demand, HDTV, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone service. One additional item I learned recently was that some local electric companies have been testing the feasibility of offering this same bundle of services over their existing power lines. It should be an interesting time if all of this competition comes to fruition. If it were you, how would you plan to counteract those pressures?
Once you can say, "we are going to be the provider of choice of music and video through our iPod products" or "we provide the software that maximizes service business office efficiency" or "we are the preeminent supplier of finishing equipment to the construction industry" it is time to think about how you will make that vision a reality.
Unless you are an organization where production is totally automated and customers are beating down you doors demanding your products at a rate that is significantly greater than the worldwide capacity to produce (somewhat like the first years of PC production) the only way that you will achieve your vision is through your employees.
That makes the next step in this process the determination of where your employees are relative to a continuum that extends from totally engaged and highly satisfied with their position to totally disengaged and actively seeking other employment. Possibly the best way to determine your employee participation level is to conduct, or have conducted, an employee attitude survey. This device, generally given confidentially or electronically today, can be tailored or customized to draw out employee beliefs or opinions about a variety of issues from which a determination of engagement level can be developed.
Again, just as in the case of vision, once a starting and an end point are identified and codified we can begin our journey to the desired destination. If your employees are very disengaged your actions will most probably need to be radical. Conversely, if the average employee is "mostly" or "very" engaged change may be more a matter of tweaking or fine-tuning of the processes.
One argument I have heard in the past goes something like this "gee, if we loose someone, the replacement might be worse." I would agree that it would be possible to constantly downgrade your employee population, but I would ask, "Why would you ever let that happen?" While we get reports that the unemployment rate is hovering around the 5% level, and that has historically been considered full employment, I contend that it is always possible to find better employees.
When I was recruiting, after the applicant completed the skill qualifications, I would ask some seemingly innocent questions. These were "what did you like most/least about your last company/supervisor?" Because the questions seemed so innocent and only asked for an opinion I never had anyone hesitate to respond. Knowing our company, its culture, and the various supervisors these questions allowed me to determine how well that applicant would match not only our culture, but also how well they would like the management style of their prospective supervisor. When these elements are closely aligned you are hiring an employee who will most probably be highly engaged.
So, to summarize, do an honest and thorough SWOT assessment, paint that detailed and colorful picture of your next ideal state, find out how engaged your employees are, and implement plans to move your employees into the highly engaged category and watch your profits soar.
Copyright 2005 J.E. Mittler & Company. All rights reserved.
