Stay on goal
When a situation puts your company in circumstances beyond your control, one of the first things you need to do is focus your employees on what they can control.
At Santarus, Proehl needed to continue focusing his research teams on research, his sales teams on driving sales, his administrators on administration.
Emphasizing the variables you are able to control takes the spotlight off the looming issue, at least on a day-to-day basis, and helps keep employees at work on the basic blocking and tackling that is going to drive your company’s success, no matter the influence of outside circumstances.
“If employees understand what the corporate goals are and what their individual goals are, it keeps them focused on the things they can control and the things they can accomplish,” Proehl says. “Most people want to accomplish goals, as long as they are measurable, specific and attainable. It keeps attention on the right things, as opposed to on the wrong things that can kind of weigh people down when things don’t go well.”
At Santarus, setting and communicating goals begins with Proehl and his leadership team. The company’s top management works together to define corporate goals, which then cascade down to departmental and individual goals. Goals have to align from each individual up to the overarching corporate goals.
“You really have to spend time with your leadership team,” Proehl says. “You have to continue talking to them about how their department goals align with the corporate goals. In some cases, it’s easier for some functions or departments.
“Say you have a corporate goal of a certain revenue. It’s easy for the corporate folks to say they’re easily aligned to that particular goal, but it’s more difficult when you talk to someone in research and development or quality assurance. You need to spend more time talking to them about the things they can do to drive revenue. We might get into discussions about clinical trials or how they can provide information to help drive revenue. It all comes back to explaining how departmental goals drive corporate goals, and then showing how each individual’s goals align with the corporate goals.”
Aligning goals vertically helps give each employee a sense of how their daily tasks mesh with the overall mission of the company. If each employee is engaged in that manner, you will form a company of people who realize that each piece of the puzzle is integral in driving profit, maintaining a culture and working through adversity.
It’s up to you and your management team to start that process. You need to take the larger mission and goals of the company and convey it to each department — and by extension, each employee — in a manner that shows how everything fits together.
“At the end of the day, people want to understand where the company is going and how they fit in with the future growth of the company,” Proehl says. “They want to really feel that the company has a vision and a strategy to grow and become a success. If they don’t feel that or don’t see that, people start to get disenchanted or disengaged.”
