Q. How do you communicate
your turnaround
strategy?
Recognize what the
company’s strengths and
weaknesses are. Put a
plan in place around
those strengths and
eliminate those weaknesses.
Meet with your direct
reports multiple times a
week. Make sure that
when there are specific
tasks that need to be
done, you’re sitting
down one-on-one with
your management team
and laying out their
responsibilities and their
functional roles on a
day-to-day basis. If there
are too many things thrown at
them all at once, they’ll get
overwhelmed, and the execution will inevitably fail.
Focus on the low-hanging
fruit: What are the things that
can quickly be identified as
weaknesses, and then how do
you very quickly execute to
eliminate them from your
business model? You sit down
with each individual, communicate that to them and make
sure that they completely
understand.
Get feedback and input from
them. Employees who have
been doing their job for quite
some time may get tunnel vision
— but they still are able to see
certain little golden nuggets that
you may be overlooking.
Moving quickly provides
some form of comfort: We are
going to be OK, and we’re
beginning to see the fruits of
our labor. You can have the
best execution plan in the
world and can execute against
it, but if you don’t celebrate the
successes along the way, then
it can break down very quickly.
When we executed something and saw it was working,
it was discussed openly
throughout the organization.
We did little things that really
didn’t cost the company all
that much — brought in pizza
or ice cream at the end of the
day. We would all come
together as a complete team
and talk about what was done
and what worked, and it created additional energies for that
next strategic piece that we
needed to accomplish.
Q. What is the CEO’s role in
the communication process?
You definitely want to listen
and seek input from the people that report to you because
it shows that you care about
them. You’re interested in
hearing what they have to say.
They have to feel that you
have their best interests at
heart, and, at the same time,
they know that they can come
to you to talk about anything.
You need to be the absolute
champion of the cause at hand.
I sit down one on one and just
ask, ‘What do you think would
work? What have you seen in
the past that hasn’t worked?’
By allowing them to provide
their input — and then there’s
feedback coming back from
you — you work together to
ultimately come up with what’s
going to be the best strategy. It
provides the best form of execution, if right upfront, you’ve
got their buy-in.
Your job is to keep people
focused to task and continuously communicate the successes. When something is not
going as planned, you very
quickly have the conversations
with the team and the individual responsible for that particular facet to see where you’re
going awry and what you can
do to get back on track.
HOW TO REACH: Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Co., (800) 458-5282 or www.joffreys.com
