Stay focused on the customer
At the end of the day, getting your employees to open up and being visible to them in the workplace does no good if the focus of your business and the focus of the majority of your conversations are not on the customer.
In a tough economy, focusing on the customer should be the root of everything that you do.
“There’s plenty of companies that have wonderfully happy employees that aren’t making money and aren’t delivering results,” Burns says. “There’s no future in that, no matter how happy they are. That business model fails. Everything has got to be about delivering excellence. Everything has got to be about delivering a deliverable that’s better than the market and that the client is ecstatic about receiving. That’s where you keep your eye. If you get your eye too caught up in just the environment, you’ll miss it.”
You need to get your employees engaged in your business, and you need to build trust in order for them to buy in to your leadership and give their best for the company. You need to work through their concerns, particularly in a tough economy.
But if the end goal of your efforts isn’t to provide the best service to the customer, it won’t work.
“If every conversation has something to do with clients and deliverables, something good is going to come of it,” Burns says. “If you’re not talking about a client or a deliverable, you have to ask yourself, ‘Why are we talking about this?’”
If you want to maintain a focus on the customer, then get out there and talk about it. But talk about it with an attitude of collaboration.
“You as the leader need to plug into your core group, not bring your core group to plug into you,” Burns says. “You go out there and you plug into them and make sure you understand and make sure they understand. Then you leave and let them do their job. … I think sometimes we do a bad thing when we draw them in and pull them up and put them on display. That’s not what made them good. What made them good was what they were doing out there producing those results.
“Leadership is living out a credible witness to what it is you want your life to be about. People are either going to follow you or they’re not. To try to institute something that says, ‘OK, this is how you do it,’ I’m just not a big believer in that.”
Burns believes it is that focus that will make the difference for Clayco.
“We believe those who stay on task and deliver the excellence that we’ve been delivering for the past 23 years, we will gain market share,” Burns says. “If we train that on a market that’s really not as focused as it should be, we can gain market share.”
How to reach: Clayco, www.claycorp.com or (314) 429-5100
