Q. How do you hold people
accountable?
It’s easy to do on a sales side
— you can keep score with dollars — but on something like
video production, the only thing
to go on is, did they meet the
deadline? What’s the quality
like? Is the client happy?
Each job description’s a little
bit different. Gauge someone’s
job based on how it impacts the
customer, whether that’s phone
calls or e-mails we get unsolicited from our customers or that’s
feedback that we ask for in the
form of surveys.
At the end of the day, if our employees, directly or indirectly,
are making the customer happy,
we’re going to be successful. If
the customer’s happy, business
is going to stay in-house, and
everybody else wins.
Whenever a client tells you
that we not only met their business objective but made it a
pleasure, as well, that’s the
equivalent of a sales guy blowing through his sales goal for
the month.
Q. How else do you get
employees to blow through
their goals?
It’s setting the right expectations when they’re hired. We let
everybody know, ‘You’re not a
one-trick pony. You’ve been
brought to the table because you
bring a number of different skill
sets, and we intend to use them.
We may not use them this week,
or in the first three months
while you’re here, but trust me,
we’re going to tap into that
someday.’ We tell them going
into it when we’re hiring, and
they agree to it or they don’t.
Q. How can other leaders get
their employees into that kind
of mindset?
Share with people what your
goals are. Every employee could
tell you what our goal is for the
next two years and how we get
there. That translates into filtering through, ‘OK, what are my
current projects, what is my job
description, what am I supposed to be doing today, what
am I doing this minute, and is it
tying into the overall goal of the
company?’
If everybody is on the same
page, you’ve got a chance at
empowering the folks to help
you meet that. You’ve just multiplied yourself and your own
vision for where you want to go
by letting your employees share
in that.
HOW TO REACH: Splash Media LP, (972) 392-6700 or www.splashmedia.com