Managing your company is difficult to do, especially if you’re operating exclusively and making decisions in solace.
Leading an organization is even more challenging from the shadows. While leaders can lead from a supporting role, leaders should be out front, visible, and accessible.
It’s been said that a business is merely a group of people working together towards a common goal, generally referred to as the mission. If you can agree with simple definition in mind, it’s a good reminder that at the heart of your business is the people.
Know What Your Team Actually Does
May I ask, do you really know what everyone does all day long? Sure, you may think you know.
When each position was first created, it was accompanied by a job description. However, you’ve likely discovered that the actual job is a lot more nuanced than the broad strokes often typed up in its public-facing description on a job board.
Perhaps you’re comfortable holding to a few general ideas of what happens among each group of employees. Your salespeople make sales calls, your marketing folks are ensuring your brand has a consistent look, feel, and message across a variety of media, your finance people are issuing invoices, collecting receivables, and reconciling bank accounts, and your IT group keeps the whole operation up-and-running.
Require Accountability in a High Performance Environment
The first tool is technology driven, but rest assured it need not be. You can drive personal accountability just as easily with a pen and paper approach as with a cloud-based solution.
Those of us who are data-driven must have a means of evaluating not only high level business metrics such as sales, customer satisfaction scores, and the state of your accounts receivables, but also gaining insight into the performance of individuals in your organization.
Consider building personal performance dashboards, a unique set of reports and graphs charting an employee’s progress over time. Yes, the sales representatives and account manager dashboards will be very similar and should include sales by month, sales by product line, but also leading indicators such as calls by day and opportunities in the pipeline. Customer service specialists should have a different set of graphs on their personal performance dashboard. These should include current workload as measured in open support tickets, the time those tickets have remained open, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction scores as measured over time.
Challenge yourself to build personalized performance dashboards for every area of the business, including finance, marketing, public relations and IT. If there is a task that needs to be completed and there is an employee’s name attached to that task, then they must be held accountable for completing work on time and with excellence.
Manage By Walking Around
Literally walking through your office will open your eyes to how people are both working independently and collaborating with each other. Is the office quiet and everyone is focused intensely on their screens furiously tackling a tight deadline? Or, perhaps, you’ve observed an energetic sales meeting. As well, don’t forget to consider your IT or product development team. They are likely troubleshooting a recent issue or even innovating your next great product. Your fresh perspective may be welcome; just ask first.
Walking around the office shouldn’t be done quickly. Rather, stop by for a quick 3 to 5-minute chat with various employees to learn more. Ask, “What are you working on right now?” or “Any breakthroughs today?” You can even ask, “What’s been the highlight of your day?” Having a few questions up your sleeve will help you to initiate conversations with virtually anyone in your company, even if your paths don’t normally cross. Being genuinely interested in your team has dual benefits; you’ll inspire higher performances and you’ll learn about current challenges and successes.
Become a Not-So-Undercover Boss
Without actually sitting beside people in key roles for extended periods of time, you may never know what actually goes on in a given day.
The evolution of “management by walking around” includes an approach with a new twist, called the “not-so-undercover boss.” By assuming this role for a week, or even just a day, means that you, the boss, physically relocate. Many Japanese work environments do not have private offices. Wall Street firms are also set-up in a similar fashion so that leaders within the company know what’s going on on a moment-by-moment basis.
The effort is worth it. You’ll overhear customer concerns and how your people address those in real-time. You’ll notice who talks to who in your company, why, and how often. You may even hear incorrect information being relayed to a customer from a new sales representative who has high potential, yet would greatly benefit from additional training. After making such observations, you could develop a tip sheet summarizing key positioning statements, answers to frequently asked questions, and even numbers commonly referenced — all in an effort to be communicating consistently with your customers.
Let it be said that you’re fooling no one. Your team knows that while it appears you’re working on a project (which you should be), you’re also overhearing conversations. State the obvious and tell those around your new digs that you’ll be working on a special project but you’re there to listen, learn, and be a resource if needed.
Simply stating that you’re there as a resource will prompt team members to walk up to you and ask challenging questions, questions that wouldn’t normally be asked if you were squirreled away in your office.
Share your knowledge, shape the company, and lead your organization to the promising future you know is just over the horizon.
Take the First Step
Resolve to apply one of these tools in your company. You can’t supervise from afar, nor can you do this well without knowledge. Regardless of the size of your business, having a deeper understanding of the daily activities of your team will only help you make smarter decisions. You’ll be spotting problems earlier, celebrating successes as they happen and creating an environment where information flows freely.