Stay focused on your
business

Jim O’Connor
chairman and CEO, Republic Services Inc.

Jim O’Connor has seen it happen again
and again. Competitors in the solid waste
industry make acquisitions that they
thought would help their business but
instead, ended up creating major problems.

O’Connor, chairman and CEO of Republic
Services Inc. has taken great care to avoid
this fate by focusing intently on his company’s internal makeup.

“The business is constantly evolving,”
O’Connor says. “You need to stay ahead of
the evolutionary process. If you don’t stay
ahead, the evolution will become a revolution and you’ll find yourself not able to
easily catch up.”

In order to stay focused on your company’s sweet spot, you need to have clear
goals that everyone in your company
aspires to achieve. Employees also need to
know what their role is in achieving these
goals.

“It’s consistency in the messages that
are delivered to the three constituencies
we are most concerned about,” O’Connor
says. “Those would be our employees, our
customers and our shareholders. They
have a clear vision of what our expectations are for the business and a clear
understanding of our focus on goals and
objectives in the short term and intermediate term.”

Before you can expect your employees to
march to a steady beat, you have to make
sure that you yourself are clear about what
your company needs to do. You need an
effective means of communicating that message to your people.

“You have to get out and meet the people,
and you have to have an exchange with the
people out there to understand the business
that you are trying to deal with,” O’Connor
says.

Keep in mind that communication happens all the time, whether you are stopping by someone’s cube or employees are
reading your body language. Everything
you say and do conveys a message to
employees who are watching you for
clues on how they are supposed to act.