Explain your mission

Steve Tirado
president and CEO, Silicon Image Inc.

Steve Tirado, president and CEO of
Silicon Image Inc., says the challenges of
running a business change dramatically as
you scale your company upward. If you
want to be successful, you need to change
your management style accordingly.

“You’ve got to spend a lot of time making
sure you’re not the only one pulling the
wagon,” he says.

As the company grows and diversifies, the
skill set needed to manage effectively
changes. You begin to need the processes to
scale your business, and you start realizing
the importance of communication.

Each new employee you hire needs to
know the company’s goals and objectives.
So to make sure that all new employees are
aligned with the vision, you need to be able
to communicate to them how each element
of your overarching strategy relates to their
everyday job. Tirado says explaining the
company’s mission can get repetitious, but
you have to remind yourself that you set the
tone for the entire organization.

“You have to get yourself comfortable
with the idea that you have to repeat your
vision and mission again and again and
again,” Tirado says. “You can’t get bored
with it. Every time you talk about it, you
have to have a lot of enthusiasm.

“People look to your body language, your
tone, the words you use to describe what
you do on a daily basis, and they want to
see a lot of passion and conviction. If you
talk to the people in my company, they’ll
say, ‘Yeah, he does that.’”

“You’ve got to be willing to say it again
and again, because it takes a long while for
messages from the top to get across to
everybody in the organization.”

Tirado keeps the most recent 10 initiatives
firmly in his mind, and makes sure he is
able to relate the current goals back to the
vision and mission of the company.

Many employees can get bogged down in
the day-to-day operations, and you should-n’t miss a chance to remind them how their
work fits into the company’s strategy.

“If you don’t continuously reinforce and
talk about what you’re doing and where
you’re going, you tend to get a loosening of
that alignment or you get wandering off in
that direction,” Tirado says. “It’s a constant
and consistent amount of communication
that has to go on related to that to keep the
alignment where it needs to be.”