Share your vision
Beale says the foundation of successful decision-making is making sure your employees share and understand the company’s
vision.
At its root, a vision is really a very simple expression of the
potential of an organization. If you want to get the best out of your
employees, you need to find a way for them to understand the
organization’s potential. If you don’t involve your employees, you
run the risk of two classic managerial problems. First, no matter
how often you walk the floor, you aren’t as in touch with the issues
your company faces every day as the employee who deals with
them on a daily basis. So if you refuse to use your employees as
resources when making decisions, you are ignoring what could be
valuable insight.
Second, by letting employees go about their daily work in a vacuum, unaware of how their job fits in to the company’s strategy,
you may be wasting their potential.
“Many times people will operate in isolation, and they will produce something or do something and maybe don’t even know why
or how it contributes to the broader mosaic,” Beale says. “Part of
that is just getting people to understand the objective from the
beginning and what their piece of the puzzle is contributing to the
whole.”
To make that happen, Beale has set up a system that ensures
employees know the importance of their roles and how the work
they do on a day-to-day basis helps the organization’s bottom line.
The first step is to involve your employees in every aspect of the
strategic planning process, from the ground floor on up. This does-n’t mean you have to somehow find a room large enough to hold
1,000 people — it just means that you have to encourage communication at every level of your organization. Make sure your direct
reports are talking to their direct reports. Part of their job is taking
the big-picture view and distilling it for their particular department.
“You want to create an environment where people are also questioning, ‘Why is this? How is this part of furthering our aims? How
is this part of achieving our objectives? How is this part of realizing our vision?’” Beale says. “The starting point has to be just an
understanding of what the objectives are and what the direction is.
That is an important way that people are able to understand their
contribution to the whole and take ownership for their part of the
success.”
By keeping his employees in the loop instead of in the dark,
Beale creates a culture in which his employees don’t just know
how to do their jobs — they understand why they do their jobs.
Because their managers meet with them to keep them informed on
company matters, the employee base is more knowledgeable, and
knowledgeable employees are more likely to ask the type of big-picture questions that Beale wants them to ask.
If your employees understand the company’s long-term goals
and the plan to achieve those goals, they become more flexible if
the plan needs to change.
“The plan may change while the objectives stay the same,” he
says. “When you are focusing on steps and process, you can lose
sight of the end goal. But it’s all about continuing to measure and
test your progress as you move toward a business objective. That,
by itself, is what allows everyone to be a participant and protagonist in the plan. It’s an indirect mode of communication, but it’s a
very important one.”
