Q. How do you make the impossible seem possible for your employees?
By giving them examples of ways that can be achieved. Allowing them to see that if it’s just me that has the vision or goal for the company, I can’t do it by myself.
Through our strategic planning process, we bring everybody together to understand what our three-year process is going to look like. Then, we have pretty detailed plans on how we plan to achieve that, and we share that with everybody.
By showing them a road map, it then becomes reality, and that’s something people can believe they can do. It only makes them feel much more enthusiastic about what they bring to the table and how they’re going to help get to that goal that you’re trying to get to.
The way that we do that is, as a leadership team, we develop the strategic plan every year. It’s a rolling strategic plan, a three-year plan. Once it’s finalized and our leadership has agreed to it, we then gather all of our employees together.
As a final draft, we ask for input from them. If they have ideas or they think there are some areas where we’re lacking or it’s not what they expected, we then take that feedback from them and we finalize the plan. Once we have the plan finalized, then we come up at a department level or a major function level with an action plan. The leader of that area will then work within their organization over the course of a month and a half to develop strategic actions, and we assign owners.
If you are very inclusive with your employees, you ask them for their help, you ask them their opinion, you ask them to be very involved in the development of the strategic plan, people are inspired by that.
How to reach: Oxford Consulting Group Inc., (614) 310-2700 or www.oxford-consulting.com
