Get the message out
Tirado says the challenges of running a business change dramatically as you scale your company upward. If you want to be successful, you need to change your management style accordingly.
“You’ve got to spend a lot of time making sure you’re not the only
one pulling the wagon,” he says.
When a company is smaller, you can rely on what Tirado calls the
“team of superstars.” Everyone in the company knows how to get
things done and decisions are made quickly, without relying on
other team members for input.
“When you’re smaller, you can get everybody in a single room
and work on things together,” Tirado says. “It doesn’t really force
you to have a lot of process in place. In fact, in a lot of smaller companies, it can be argued that process gets in the way of creativity.”
However, as the company grows and diversifies, the skill sets needed to manage effectively change. You begin to need the processes to
scale your business, and you start realizing the importance of communication.
Each new employee you hire needs to know the company’s goals
and objectives. So to make sure that all of the employees are
aligned with the vision, you need to be able to communicate to
them how each element of your overarching strategy relates to
their everyday job. Tirado says explaining the company’s mission
can get repetitious, but you have to remind yourself that as the
face of the company, you set the tone for the entire organization.
“You have to get yourself comfortable with the idea that you have
to repeat your vision and mission again and again and again,”
Tirado says. “You can’t get bored with it. Every time you talk about
it, you have to have a lot of enthusiasm.
“People look to your body language, your tone, the words you
use to describe what you do on a daily basis, and they want to see
a lot of passion and conviction. If you talk to the people in my company, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, he does that.’
“You’ve got to be willing to say it again and again, because it
takes a long while for messages from the top to get across to everybody in the organization.”
Always be ready for questions, because you never know when
you’ll be stopped in an elevator with an employee. Tirado keeps
the most recently implemented 10 initiatives firmly in his mind
and makes sure he is able to relate the current goals back to the
vision and mission of the company.
Don’t forget to tie today’s objectives to the big picture. Many
employees can get bogged down in the day-to-day operations, and
you shouldn’t miss a chance to remind them how their work fits
into the company’s overarching strategy.
“If you don’t continuously reinforce and talk about what you’re
doing and where you’re going, you tend to get a loosening of that
alignment or you get wandering off in that direction,” Tirado says.
“It’s a constant and consistent amount of communication that has
to go on related to that to keep the alignment where it needs to be.”
