Creating Employee Passion, is Your Strategy Ready?
Note: One of
your key leadership tasks is to be strategically ready to lead, today you
will discover how.
Does it frustrate
you when you repeatedly communicate
your plans to your employees yet the messages just don’t seem
to get through?
What would it
mean to you if every time you introduced a change in
support of your strategy your employees always became actively engaged in making the
change happen for you?
Imagine how
successful your team will be when you start using our
proven leadership techniques to ensure the messages that you
prioritize get through every time
.
Your leadership Tasks
þ Align your messages to
your strategy
þ Make sure your messages
get
through
“What is the
difference between a manager and a leader?” A great question frequently
asked by people who seek to develop their skills ….. and today you
will discover one of the key differences.
Everyday you
will have management and leadership tasks. One of your key leadership
tasks is to identify the key items in your strategy that affect your
people and to communicate these strategic priorities.
You will find many managers who
actively walk through their business, engaging their people in idle or
social discussion, which may include some discussion about work. These
managers do not engage the minds of their people.
Management by Walking
Around will help you to get into the mind of
your people only if you are consistent with your communication themes. The best way for leaders
to be consistent is to be strategic.
After
reading every word of
this leadership program, you
will become skilled at sticking to the same communication themes.
Your will then discover that your persistence will drive your passion and the passion of
your people.
And, your people will know exactly what is
important to you and your business….
Why Be Consistent?
One of your
leadership tasks it to create an environment where your people can become
passionate about your vision. It is hard for your people to be passionate
about something different everyday. Your passionate and consistent
reinforcement of the same themes will quickly rub off on your employees.
When you are consistent your peole will know exactly what is important
to you and your messages will get through.
If you constantly change themes and
messages your employees will learn that all things are important meaning
nothing is particularly important.
Recap:
Your leadership Tasks
o
Align your messages to your
strategy
oIdentify
your Strategic
Priorities
oIdentify
You Strategic Sub
Priorities
þ Make sure your messages get
through
MBWA,
Management by Walking Around
Creating
Employee Passion, is your strategy ready?
One of your most important leadership tasks is to be strategically ready
If you are going to
spend time reinforcing key messages with your employees, through,
Management by Walking Around, then it makes sense that you align your
messages to your strategy.
Your key messages
should stem from your identified business priorities (strategy) so that,
overtime, when you are floor walking, you can stick to the same common
themes and discuss the things that are of upmost importance to you or your
business with your employees.
The term business priorities does not mean things like
getting an urgent order out for a key customer today, it is referring to
strategic or longer term business priorities, examples of strategic
business priorities could be
Key
Priorities
Improve process quality to ensure the customer
gets a predictable service
Create a
customer focused culture
Improve sales
performance
Improve
employee engagement
Improve
Occupational Health and Safety performance
(You will notice a
theme of improvement or making things better)
Use
this space to enter the top 3 priorities for your business
First
Priority
Second
Priority
Third
Priority
Recap: Your leadership Tasks
þ
Align
your messages to your strategy
þ
Identify
your Strategic Priorities
oIdentify
You Strategic Sub
Priorities
þ
Make
sure your messages get through
More on Your Priorities:
When identifying your
business priorities you will need to think about priorities and sub
priorities, this will help you get your level of thinking right.
Example:
If we stick with the
Occupational Health & Safety, OH&S, theme
You may have a focus
on improving manual handling over the next 6 months, OH&S would be the
priority with manual handling the sub priority .
The reason for this
distinction is simply ease of consistency, in this example you want to
create a culture that values OH&S and everything that comes with it,
but are currently working on improving manual handling. While doing your
MBWA, management by walking around you will communicate with your
employees about your OH&S initiative – manual
handling.
Priority and Sub Priority Examples:
Key Priority -
"Improving sales performance" and you are currently working on (sub
priorities)
Key
Priority
Sub
Priorities
Improving Sales
Performance
Improving
cross selling within your product
range
Introducing
up-selling to existing clients
Getting more
referrals from your
clients
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Or, Key Priority -
"Improving Occupational Health and Safety performance" and you are
currently working on (sub priorities)
Key
Priority
Sub
Priorities
Improving
Occupational Health and Safety
performance
Improving the
reporting of hazards
Focusing on
improving manual handling technique
Lifting the
standard of house keeping
Or, Key Priority –
“Improving customer service” and you are currently working on (sub
priorities)
Key
Priority
Sub
Priorities
Improving
customer service
Improving
your greeting
Thanking
customers for their business
Reducing the
use of hold/wait time
In your MBWA,
management by walking around program, you will pick the key priority, from
the first example above, improving sales rather than the sub priority
improving cross selling as your theme.
Complete the table below for your
business environment
Priority
Sub
Priority
span>
Print
this form when you have completed your list of priorities and sub
priorities
Recap: Your leadership Tasks
þ
Align
your messages to your strategy
þ
Identify
your Strategic Priorities
þ
Identify
You Strategic Sub
Priorities
þ
Make
sure your messages get through
Will these
priorities change?
You will have a group
of priorities that will rarely change but your sub priorities will change
frequently, the art of the good leader is to draw from the common theme
and make the link for your employees.
For example: The
current message might be “we are reviewing our customer service standards
and I would like to discuss with you our new customer greeting” and in one
years time you might have a message like “we are reviewing our customer
service standards and I would like to discuss with you how you are finding
the new on hold initiative”
Occasionally you will
need to change one of your business priorities, this has only happened to
me when my teams have embraced the theme and have commenced driving their
own continuous improvement on the theme.
How to
influence your poeple by incorporating your Strategic Planning
If you have read the
“what makes a good leader” guide on industry environment analysis, you will recall that industry knowledge is
useful to help with your MBWA, management by walking
around.
Your industry
analysis will often provide a compelling reason for your people to rally
for the cause, not only influcencing your people to support your
direction, but also building company pride.
For
example:
If you have a
business priority to improve quality and you know from your industry
analysis that your business may be faced with new entrants to your
market you can use this information as a positive
motivator
“to stave of
competition in our traditional markets we can differentiate ourselves on
quality”
Management by Walking
Around: Examples
Example: Production
Environment Observation
If OH&S is
important and you walk through your production environment and observe
someone using poor manual handling process you can stop them and show them
how to lift saftely and why it is important to do so.
Or
If quality is
important you can ask employees on your walk how quality is going, can we
improve?
Repetitive
reinforcement on your floor walks will reinforce your priorities.
Employees only take a few weeks to become focused on what they think is
important to their leader.
Example: Sales Call
Centre Communication
If you place a high
priority on conversion in a sales call centre then every time you talk to
someone you need to include discussion on conversion,
“How is your
conversion going?”
“What can we do to
help your conversion?”
“Hey I saw your
conversion is up this month! Well done”
Alternatively if you
are trying to improve cross-selling then every conversation needs to have
some element of cross-selling in it.
Example: Customer
facing staff
If you think it is
important that all staff have a visible name tag, when floor walking you
may observe people with their tag obscured by long hair, a tie or a scarf
– just to name a few, you can ask them to have their name tag on display
and the reasons why.
Summary
Your stragegy is
ready, when you know what your top three priorities and sub priorities
are.