Engage your team
Simons wanted to help Novus in the present, but he also wanted the company to be more prepared for the next economic downturn. He needed to build a way of doing business that promoted diversity and was constantly cranking out new ideas and new products.
“I knew the cycle would turn again, and I wanted us to be ready,” Simons says. “I wanted us to avoid being caught in this down cycle the next time it came. I knew that would require having other products that were going into other parts of the livestock industry. That would actually deepen our business with our customers.”
Simons’ task now was to sell his team on the idea. He had surrounded himself with supporters, but he still needed to get them fully bought in to his idea of pushing research and development if this was to work throughout the company.
“This needed to be their plan,” Simons says. “It wasn’t just done in one day. It was done over the course of sharing ideas back and forth. But eventually we all came together in one room and then we broke into small groups and took on different components. HR led a workshop talking about the people side. Communication and marketing took the reputation side. People from sales took on the growth side and product leadership took on the profitability side. They all came back together into the big group and came back with some ideas.”
Let each department get together and just throw
ideas on the table to get the discussion going. Your job is to keep it focused on the ultimate goal, which in the case of Novus was to find better ways to serve customers.
“Try to cut through some of those things and build a consensus around what’s most important,” Simons says. “When there are still too many things to do and priorities have to be set, it comes down to the CEO to do the final allocation of the resources.”
But short of you needing to step in and do that, you’re trying to promote a culture of participation. It will help you work through most doubts that people may have.
“People can deal with a lot of uncertainty if they are aware of what they can do to affect it,” Simons says. “So what we’ve tried to do is make them aware. If we’re going through a very good time, we don’t want them to lose sight of the challenges that could come up in the future.”
Simons thought that a company that always had an eye on the future would be more prepared and more in touch with its customers.
“People will feel empowered and they will be working on the right things, because they’ll understand what is really important and what’s not really important,” Simons says.
