Keep in touch. The biggest risk a company can have is you disconnect yourself from the field or the front line and you try to build commitments in a silo. Have a committee or work stream that represents multiple roles and accountabilities as the metrics are being defined. It’s almost a validation that if someone on the front line is going to be landing this commitment, will it make sense in their world?
Have a group of individuals that are working through all the commitments that are being defined and then have checkpoints along the way as they are being defined and before they get landed.
Success will only come if your front line believes in what they are ultimately driving toward and if they feel that they are going to be successful.
Provide opportunities. As you’re developing leaders, you give them opportunities to step out of their day job and work on special assignments like this. It’s not the business group selecting their own people. They reach out to leaders like myself and say, ‘Can you nominate three or four people to be on this committee for the next five or six weeks to decide what commitments we want to land across the globe?’
Let’s say we’re trying to make a decision on one product group in a strategy and we want to make sure we understand what commitments we want to land. That product group can push out, let’s say, the draft version. You would push that out and say, ‘Here’s our draft version. We’d like you to make sure you have as many people as you can review this and add any commentary. Then we’re going to review everybody’s feedback.’
It enables employees to easily connect with a portal that has an opportunity to review, edit and comment and not lose that feedback as it goes back up to the decision-makers. That’s one way we make sure we’re not missing opportunities.
Track progress. Give folks connectivity to a portal where scorecards are tracked so at any time there is a portal for your team where they can see how you are trending. Everyone in the company, from our CEO to our sales reps on the front line all want to know how well we’re performing on things we’re measured against.
We all want to be successful. If you don’t have something to measure to ensure you’re being successful, I don’t think we would be driving the results we want to. We’d be going blind.
How to reach: Microsoft Corp., (800) 765-7768 or www.microsoft.com
