Show your confidence
You can have the most imaginative and creative plan in the world to get your business turned around, but if you don’t have confidence in your ability to make it happen, it’s never going to get you anywhere.
“If you’ve come into a room and you’re going to pitch me, you better be damn confident about what it is you’re doing and what it is you’re saying,” says Alfonso, putting himself in the position of the beleaguered leader. “You can tell pretty quickly whether the individuals on the other side of the table believe in themselves.
“One of the keys for me is going to be, are they demonstrating the appropriate level of not only competency but confidence in themselves in order for me to engage in this relationship?”
Whether you’re an investment firm that is buying other companies or just a CEO who is trying to turn your own business around, the challenge is the same. You need to project confidence that you can lead these people to success and prosperity.
“If the leader truly believes in what he is doing and what the business is doing and really has that passion, the type of passion where when you talk about it, you can even get choked up about it, it’s contagious and it can spread,” Alfonso says.
“It’s a level of intimacy. It’s working with everyone in your organization from the top down and being very intimate with the details and every functional area. I don’t know that sitting behind a desk and pounding out memos or communications is the most effective way. It’s by interacting at an intimate level with your work force.”
Give people a sense of where they fit into the picture of taking your company to greater heights and be specific about the details.
“It’s essential,” Alfonso says. “Everyone needs to understand not only where they fall in the organization from an organizational chart perspective, but they truly need to understand what is expected of them. And more importantly, not just what they’re expected to do but what that function actually does for the organization. How does it interrelate with the other functional areas and how and why does that function bring value to the organization?”
Don’t just rely on e-mails or company newsletters to speak to your people.
“Nothing can substitute an in-person meeting,” Alfonso says. “You can send out memos and put things in a newsletter, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re touching everyone or reaching everyone or that everyone is going to read it.”
In the end, it’s both your ability to communicate a plan and your discipline about sticking to it and following through on its components that will give you the best chance to generate the confidence you need.
“It’s consistency,” Alfonso says. “You can walk into any building right now and give a presentation and someone can even write it for you and you can sound really damn good. But if you don’t live those words, if you don’t demonstrate through your personal actions that you are involved and you’re following through with things, it won’t work. If you make commitments, you better damn well make them happen. Over time, that will counteract the employees’ notion that here’s just another person giving me a presentation and we’re going to walk away and it’s just going to be the same old, same old.”
