Formulate a vision
Once you’ve built a team, you need to give your people something to accomplish. You need to let them help you build and grow your business.
To do it, you need a well-defined vision for where you want the company to go and get everyone on board with it. The first step is to formulate the strategy, a task Auen has helped perform on several occasions in her prior career as a consultant.
“The strategy process doesn’t need to be hugely formal, but it needs to have all the classic elements of planning, where you say, ‘OK, what is the market doing, how does the market look, how am I positioned against the marketplace, what are my strengths and weaknesses, how are the competitors doing, what are the needs of my customers?’” Auen says. “You pull all of that together and figure out where you think the sweet spot is strategically as you move forward. Once you have that, you do a classic gap analysis of where you’re going, where you are now and how do you get there. Out of that, you build a set of priorities for the organization. You state where your focus is for this year and everything you need to do to realize that focus in some way.”
As you formulate your vision and strategy, you need to be gathering employee support as part of the process. You bring employees and managers along by allowing opportunities for input and, in some cases, criticism.
If you are met with a great deal of criticism when you roll out your vision for your company’s future, it might be a sign that either you’re not on the right track or that you have made some hiring missteps by bringing in philosophically divergent people. But you should have some differing opinions and clashing perspectives. It’s a sign that you have free thinkers on your team. If you don’t have some people who think differently, it can be as bad or worse than having a management team that is ma
rred by constant infighting.
“What you’ll find typically is the organization agrees on 80 percent of what needs to happen, but you’ll need to make some judgment calls on the other 20 percent,” Auen says. “Usually in a group discussion setting, we’ll talk through differing viewpoints and what is important. Hopefully that can drive a consensus for the last 20 percent. If you can’t, you have to make a call as the head of the company, then be able to explain why you made that call and move forward from there.
“Usually, if you get reasonable people into a room, you can drive through discussion and come up with a sense of agreement. But if you can’t, you have to do what you think is right, and at least people know that they’ve been heard, that they’ve had an opportunity for input.”
Even if you can’t drive 100 percent consensus on all issues, you can increase your chances of building consensus on key issues by setting the ground rules for discussion and debate ahead of time. If you want people to drive toward consensus and compromise, communicate that to everyone on your team at the outset of the first strategic planning meeting.
“You have to start out by letting everyone know that this is a drive for consensus around the organization’s priorities,” Auen says. “But the bottom line that you have to communicate is that we are going to come out of here with a definite set of priorities, and if I have to make some calls myself, I will, and everyone needs to support that final decision. It’s one of the basic rules of team leadership. It’s great to disagree, but once you’ve set a direction, you really have to hold together as a group. If you can’t do that, it violates your clarity of purpose and vision.”
There are two conditions where you generally draw the line between trying to build a consensus and exerting your executive decision-making power: when the issue isn’t moving toward consensus after hours and hours of meeting discussions or when everyone has reached the point of mental exhaustion. It’s a point that varies among companies and leadership teams, but as the person at the head of the table, you need to recognize the warning signs for your group.
