Make your core clear
Once you’re sure about your core, get your employees on board with clear, constant communication.
“Internally, it’s just part of the dialogue,” Fisher says. “When you’re going through development projects, strategic planning, the budgeting process for a year, find opportunities to say, ‘How does this fit into our retail focus? How’s this driving our retail business?’ [It’s] letting people know that those retail-focused projects are where we’re going to be spending our time.”
When employees suggest ideas, the expectation is that they’ve already considered that core focus. Employees are less likely to fight it or step outside of it if you’ve clearly explained what your core is and why.
“A lot of that goes to the upfront messaging,” Fisher says. “You can’t just say, ‘We’re retail.’ You have to explain why and engage people in that; why is that the decision-making?
“People know this is our core. This is where we came from. This is what we’re better at than anybody else and here’s why. If you walk people through why that’s your focus, you don’t have to spend as much time defending it throughout the years.”
While communication about the core is built into every planning process, Fisher also finds ways to sneak it into everyday announcements.
“Almost any time I send out an e-mail to the company — no matter what it’s about, it could be the date of our summer happy hour, an award we’re getting, a promotion — I always try to talk about our focus on the retail investors and our focus on innovation,” he says. “You can’t try to communicate 10 things at a time. So I’ve really focused on communicating our core retail business — that’s what’s generated success [and] that’s what’s going to generate continued success.”
The key, regardless of how you communicate, is that you do it relentlessly.
“It’s almost impossible inside a corporation to overcommunicate,” Fisher says. “People are focused on their day-to-day tasks. When you’re trying to get some of these bigger ideas across, you might be thinking about them every day but not everyone else in the company is thinking about them every day. You really have to communicate to the point where you’re just positive you’re overcommunicating, and then communicate even a little bit more.”
The more you communicate your core, the easier it gets. By keeping distractions at bay, you can actually add value to your core.
“At the board meeting, the conversations stay more focused around the core as opposed to getting questions, ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’” Fisher says. “Now that we’ve done a better job defining and communicating our core, it actually helps to keep the meetings focused on trying to add value around our core.”