Stick to it
A business plan is the equivalent of a personal exercise plan: If you don’t act on it, nothing happens.
“If we all ate well and exercised every day, our health care costs would be cut in half,” Stroup says.
Sticking to a business plan requires that same type of daily commitment.
“It’s all about a culture of discipline,” Stroup says. “I don’t think there’s any way to do it quite frankly if you don’t have a CEO that embraces and lives that culture of discipline. If the CEO doesn’t, you create an opportunity for everybody to feel like it’s OK that they took Wednesday off or took Friday off or they felt it was OK not to follow up.”
It comes down to setting expectations for everyone.
“The limited amount of time you have with any individual means you have almost no opportunity to observe and follow up on how they spend their time,” Stroup says. “I start by setting expectations. If my expectations are not high enough, then people are going to have tons of opportunities to waste time. I try really hard to make sure my expectations are such that there isn’t a lot of free time.”
While you can’t establish tight bonds when you have thousands of employees, you do still need to have conversations and be out there with your people and talking to them about how they are doing.
“You can find out pretty easily whether or not somebody really is trying and struggling to perform as opposed to somebody that isn’t performing but isn’t really trying very hard,” Stroup says. “That’s a pretty easy thing to do if you invest the time with people.”
To make sure everyone sticks to the plan and is making regular progress, Stroup has his employees develop their own metrics that are specifically tailored to their responsibility at the company.
“Operations have had metrics for years,” Stroup says. “Whether it’s quality, on-time delivery, productivity, safety — the operations team has had metrics forever. One that is a little bit less straightforward is human resources. But of all the groups we have in Belden, I’d say the human resources group has done as good a job as anyone, if not better, of identifying really good metrics to determine whether the things they are doing are making a difference.”
The solution for the HR team was tracking employee engagement — how good is each employee at understanding the things he or she does and how the employee connects to the company’s goals.
“It really tries to get at just how effective and engaged our employees are,” Stroup says. “Our human resources team has a measure for that every month and they measure it every month.”
Employees who struggle or slip on their metrics are not going to be punished just for
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ving a bad day, week or month.
“It’s OK with us if you are behind plan because we purposely create stretch objectives,” Stroup says. “Reaching our objectives is very difficult and it’s OK if you fall short. But it’s not OK if you are not vigorously trying to figure out why you fell short and what you feel you need to do differently to get yourself back on track. That’s what we’re focused on.”
Making the metrics public provides a little extra incentive and instills some competition in the effort to get better.
“There’s one thing that everybody wants to know and that is, ‘What’s the score?’” Stroup says. “I know I always tried a little harder when the scoreboard was on. I’m a big believer that everybody needs to have a scoreboard and they all need to be turned on.”
Stroup wants his employees to always be trying to win.
“It’s not OK just to go out and work hard,” Stroup says. “We want to win and when we don’t, it sort of irks us a little bit. We want to figure out what we didn’t do or what we did do that mattered.”