Share your Vision
You have a dream, a vision, of how your business will transform lives and revolutionise how people think of your industry in the future. You postulate how your competition will follow in your footsteps and try to emulate your business model…That’s how most small businesses get started, a dream to do things different, better in some way and that is exactly what a business needs to do to survive. Innovate. But you simply can’t do it all on your own, you need a team who will buy into the dream, work for the cause and create the company you envision.
Your business is a community, with leaders and workers but don’t confuse leading and delegation with hierarchy and titles and autocracy. Sure, rules are needed, processes and procedures avoid wastage and ensure a high level of productivity. But, building a truly successful sustainable business that has the ability to adapt to change, deal with challenges and reinvent itself when the environment requires, takes more than strict governance.
Make no mistake, many businesses will achieve huge success based purely on the strength or uniqueness of their offering but that success has a life span. A time will come when what the company offers its customers is just not enough anymore. It’s at that point when the owner will need a strong and connected culture within their business. A team of passionate and inspired employees who take up the cause to find every possible way to improve everything they do every day and thereby ensure the company out performs, out evolves and out innovates its competition on every level.
To get a team that inspired, that involved and determined to succeed is not an overnight plugin solution. There is no emergency meeting or strongly worded instruction from the top, no policy or procedural amendment that will facilitate the response required from the employees.The culture your business will need is one that started months or even years before, with the leaders standing up and sharing the master plan with the staff. Selling the dream and opening the eyes of the employees, showing them how and why their roles matter to the success of the business.
Never assume that the humble employee just understands his or her role in the bigger picture, why things need to happen a certain way or why a procedure exists. Without context, the reasons may not be clear at all and without clarity no employee will be capable of giving their very best. Clarity changes everything. Well informed employees may have a solution that management hasn’t even considered and in times of radical change, every idea is worth at least an audience with the owners.
This sort of culture building within a company cannot be stressed enough. It should be the very first area for any struggling business to address, and has a massive impact on the long term survivability of a business.