Put a plan together
Once you have people on board with you, then you can put together a plan to move you forward, but you have to be sure not to dictate to them.
“Sometimes I felt like I just wanted to dictate: ‘We’re going to do A, B and C, and that’s it,’ and that would have been more expedient for the short term but never would have accomplished the long-term objectives of getting the buy-in and getting people engaged and getting people enthusiastic for our vision for the future when they had a part in it rather than when it was dictated to them,” de la Vega says.
Instead, he asked his people to brainstorm what the top strategies should be.
“If we were going to go that [new] way, what would be the top 10 strategies and tactics to follow that?” he asked. “What are the must-dos?”
Limiting it to just 10 things will also help get buy-in down the ranks and across your organization.
“When you have unstable environments, people look to leadership for guidance, and if you’re all over the place and your priorities change and your strategic vision changes, people get very unsettled,” de la Vega says. “It’s very important to be very clear, very crisp and very consistent in what you want them to do, and then they’ll do it exceedingly well, and in some cases, it’ll probably surprise you how well.”
You might be thinking that it could be difficult to limit yourself to 10 things and are unsure of how to do that, and that’s where data comes into play.
“No. 1, you get input from those CEOs, but then you put a process in place where you just don’t listen to opinions, but you put the facts down by a creation of a plan, and that is you have to put some rigor into the financials of, ‘If we’re going to do X, Y and Z, what are the impacts of doing each of those 10 things?’” he says.
Pull out your calculators and do the math.
“We go, ‘If we execute that well, it should increase revenues by this much, reduce expenses by this much, acquire X number of new customers,’” he says.
Having a set plan is crucial to the overall turnaround process.
“Hope isn’t a strategy,” de la Ve
ga says. “Hoping things will get better or just coming up with ideas is not good enough. You have to come up with a plan that’s executable.”
