Q. How do you avoid
copycat visions?
If your vision is really
somebody else’s vision,
something you picked
up from reading a book
on Jack Welch or something, then your staff is
going to pick up on that.
Your vision has to be
real. It should come from the
core, inside of you. Otherwise,
you’ll find out over time that
your staff just doesn’t buy in.
Then, you have to go live the
vision. It’s one thing to say
what you believe and what
you think the company should
do. But if you don’t yourself
live and breathe that vision
every day in terms of your
actions, they’re going to pick up on that, as well.
It’s like the manager of a
baseball team telling his players to be on time for every
practice, and then the manager shows up late himself.
Obviously, he’s lost a lot of
credibility if that’s what he
does.
Also, be consistent in your
vision. If you’re changing your
vision every 10 days, it’s not
much of a vision after all. Not
to say you don’t adjust what
you do with new facts and circumstances, but there should
be some consistency in the
message you send to your staff
and your clients.
Q. How do you make sure
everyone gets the message?
When it comes to communication, I’ve found as our business was small and growing
larger, I found the total volume
of information that had to be
managed, the total amount of
detail that had to be taken
care of was huge. We had different people struggling to
communicate with each other
on those various details.
So one thing we did was set
up a client/staff meeting. Every
two weeks, we have a meeting
that actually takes a full day.
You can imagine the commitment that it takes — one day
out of 10 is devoted to all the
senior management getting
together, going over every single client, talking about what’s
going on with that client.
But look at the results: On a
routine basis — not random —
we have a structure where
everybody gets together and is
able to share information about
what took place in regard to a
specific client or issue. And it
updates everyone on what got
taken care of, what new issue
needs to be decided.
We do the same thing on a
monthly basis with our operating teams — staff members
who do the day-to-day work
with clients.
I’ve found it eliminates the
e-mails, the phone calls, the
other meetings that might otherwise have taken place between
those two weeks. We all get to
influence each other, trade a lot
of good information. Then, we
depart for two weeks and get
our business done somewhat
independently before we have
the next meeting.
HOW TO REACH: Precision Practice Management Inc., (314) 787-0681 or www.precisionpractice.com
