Work out a plan
What Tognoni saw at Consona was a company that had a lack
of focus, which had bred a lack of productivity. Part of the
problem was a company philosophy of pursuing new opportunities that operated at a loss with the hope that they would
turn profitable in the future.
“That’s just the wrong way to go,” Tognoni says. “The best
way to go is you cut your cost base immediately so you can
have the kind of margins that are leading the industry, not margins that are not sufficient to even pay capital back.”
In order to get a handle on what Consona’s core strengths were,
Tognoni began talking to the company’s employees.
“Candor is the answer,” Tognoni says. “It’s honesty and candor as well as being willing to answer questions.”
Tognoni sat down with the people on his new management
team and built a plan for the company while simultaneously teaching the new leaders how to build their own operating
plan.
“You take everybody together and split people off into functional areas,” Tognoni says. “You’re basically reviewing everything everybody does. It’s a pretty intense process of essentially hands-on people learning the operating approach.”
You need to be open with your people about where you think
the company needs to go and be clear that you want to hear
their feedback.
“If you’re building a plan and you’re a part of that planning
process and your boss is saying that we should do 10 widgets
a month or whatever and you know it’s not possible to do that,
you shouldn’t be just sitting there and not saying anything back
to that,” Tognoni says.
“You need to be bringing up why it’s not possible to do 10
widgets a month. If you’re wrong, you have to accept that you
could be wrong. But to not say anything and leave out a truth
that you may know ends up developing a bad plan. We’re all
going to suffer for a bad plan, and it’s because you didn’t bring
up what you maybe uniquely only knew because you were
afraid to disagree with your boss. We first tell them what that
means, and then we show it.”
This push and shove is the key reason for a bottom-up, top-down planning process and makes getting buy-in a lot easier.
“You set a strategy, and then you ask your business units to
figure out exactly what is a realistic plan for the business to
do,” Tognoni says. “There is a push and shove back and forth
from the top down and bottom up making sure you don’t set
too easy of a plan. You force analytical thinking about what the
business should do.”
You also ensure that the plan has a means of monitoring execution to ensure that the results you seek in the plan are the
results you achieve on your financial report.
