Figure out what you need
Roses could see the confusion in his company, but he needed to know exactly what was causing the uncertainty before he could begin to fix it.
“It’s establishing a gap analysis,” Roses says. “You need to understand what your needs are. You need to identify where you want to get to and where your people are at and what’s that gap. In some situations, that gap needs to be filled in four weeks or sometimes that gap needs to be filled in four years.”
Roses determined what his company needed was a common plan that outlined what to follow and that the best way to achieve that would be through training. He needed to act quickly or the confusion that existed might begin to affect the company’s relationship with its clients.
“People moving into planned communities are well-educated and intelligent people,” Roses says. “They are looking for you to be running a business, not just be a clerical person in the office depositing a check that you bring to them on the first of the month. Our needs have evolved.”
He also knew he had to involve groups of people in the development of the training. He had to make sure it was a fit with the company’s workplace culture and something that employees would eagerly pass on to others.
“It’s making sure that it’s not done in a way where you’re saying, ‘You’re doing it this way because I’m telling you to,’” Roses says. “People need to buy in to the process and they need to own it. If they own it, then they can pass it forward. If they’re just being told, ‘This is the way you do it’ and they don’t own it, it’s going to stop there and it will probably fall off. It needs to be a repetitive process where everybody is acting the same way with each other.”
The result would need to be a training course that would help employees provide better client service and, at the same time, strengthen the company’s culture by presenting more opportunities for individuals who got excited about enhancing their skills. It would also eliminate the confusion within the organization about who was supposed to be doing what.
He started by gathering his senior leaders together from across the state and along with an outside training organization, began to collectively assess the company’s needs.
“People that worked for other brands were mixed in with other brands,” Roses says. “It was the first opportunity of getting people to look at how people do business in other parts of the state and in other companies. The whole idea was learning from each other and taking what’s good and coming to a conclusion as a group what is really best practice and what the philosophy was of what we were trying to accomplish.”
When you play an active part in talking about a program and asking questions and showing your enthusiasm and curiosity for it, you only help in your efforts to earn support from others.
“It wasn’t like I said, ‘OK, HR, go ahead and find somebody to do this and this and this and bring me back trained people two years from now,’” Roses says. “Like in everything, I come up with the idea, I give it to people that like a challenge and they come back to me with things they want to recommend. Then I review the process, and if it feels right, I’ll make that decision. If it doesn’t feel right, I send them out to do more homework.
“By getting them involved in looking at it and having to present, they tend to own the process. Then all I have to do is rubber stamp it as opposed to me having to convince them that it’s good. They have kind of ferreted out all the problems.”
All this effort is contingent on your ability to identify the big problem at the beginning and make it clear to everyone what you’re working toward.
“It’s really understanding and having a clear vision of what the goal is,” Roses says. “If I did not believe that we needed to have a certain level of leadership and a certain level of competency two or three years from now, I wouldn’t have spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars I’ve spent. You have to have your finger on the pulse of where your business is going to go and what your needs are going to be going forward.”
One of the keys to solving any problem is to not approach it as a problem but rather as an opportunity. If you spin it positively, people are naturally going to be more excited about taking part in the project.
“We are all challenged in life,” Roses says. “We live a fluid life and things happen. It’s all how we face those challenges and whether we make those challenges opportunities to learn and adapt or we just see them as problems and headaches. These challenges are truly opportunities to make a difference and make the client see you through a different set of eyes.”