Set a vision
O’Maley’s first step was to develop a vision that positioned the company for future growth and that the management team could accept and embrace.
“If you don’t have a sense of where you want to go, you’re liable to end up somewhere else,” he says. “We started with setting forth and trying to articulate a vision (that) was clear and understandable and upon which we could build some strategies that were growth-focused.”
He had an off-site meeting with a group of senior managers to talk about the company’s current position, its strengths and weaknesses, and the environment it was operating in.
O’Maley says you have to be open during that process and be willing to admit that you’re not great at everything.
“You do a hard self-examination and lay it out through a matrix process, talking about characteristics and self-evaluate,” he says. “There are some things we do well, and some we’re not good at. You do a strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis and separate those into tiers.”
While O’Maley says the SWOT process can be tedious, you come out of it with a vision that is clear, actionable and consistent.
“Our vision acknowledges that we can’t do everything,” he says. “The SWOT helped us examine what we do well and how we can do it better while reminding us of the areas where we have room for improvement.”
Once the vision was developed, O’Maley set out to communicate it to employees, which he says was a labor-intensive process. He tried to keep a sense of transparency when communicating the vision, from starting the process by including senior management down to giving employees opportunity for input.
“You have to have lots of sessions where you give people an opportunity to talk about the business and the company, marketplace and share back and forth so there is a real understanding communicated,” he says.
He discussed the vision in officer meetings and used an outside consultant to meet with all employees in small group sessions to give them an opportunity to be participants in the process.
“This gave everyone a chance to be involved, express themselves and gain an understanding through the communication process,” O’Maley says. “It took a lot of time and effort, but it paid off well.”
The vision statement has been revised twice since the original one was written in 1994 to accommodate changes at the company. When a new vision was developed in 2005, O’Maley had a special meeting where the primary focus was how Ohio National could build a culture of value and performance into its second century of business.
“The relationship with our associates is so important that it’s part of the vision; we want to make it clear,” he says. “The vision says, ‘Build strong business relationships with our sales, home office and distribution associates, recognizing that our mutual success is inseparable, and promote an environment which encourages excellence in performance and results.’”
O’Maley says the vision development process at Ohio National was successful because it was specific to the company. You need to find a process that will work best for your company and employees.
“Those processes were both organized and deliberate, and while there are definitely some object lessons that others could take from our model, each organization is so different,” he says. “There is no one, single strategy that works for everyone. Each organization has to develop its own unique positioning. There’s no cookie-cutter approach that will work.”
