Technology
Goal focused
How to get your employees on board with the organizational direction
By Erik Cassano
Smart Business | August 2009
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Jeffrey Tinsley, founder, chairman and CEO, MyLife.com Inc.
The one constant in business is that nothing ever stays constant. Jeffrey Tinsley has firsthand experience on that front.
In February, Tinsley relaunched the former Reunion.com as MyLife.com Inc., a brand that better reflected the company’s growth from a high school reunion site to a broader form of social networking.
But with the launch of MyLife.com, Tinsley — the founder, chairman and CEO of the company that generated $52 million in revenue last year — was faced with a multitude of transitional tasks, not the least of which involved bringing the company’s 120 employees on board with a new brand and new strategy.
“That is really the one constant here in any business, that things are going to change and evolve, and we’re always going to try to evolve the business in a positive way,” Tinsley says. “We had to coordinate a number of teams and people across this entire organization to make it happen over many, many months. It wasn’t just something that happened overnight.”
Smart Business spoke with Tinsley about how you can focus your employees on common goals.
Hire to evolve; train to evolve. It starts with new people joining the organization. I have an orientation meeting with new people to start, and within that meeting, we do a number of things. We talk about the business, the opportunities of the market and what we’re going to focus on. We take people through the individual departments, how they impact the business and drive us toward the goals of the organization. We even get down right into values, what do we believe in here. We believe in open, honest communication, collaboration, yielding the best possible results, the best possible opportunities, and we believe in evolution, that things are going to change and that we’re going to embrace change.
It really starts with good, solid orientation that shows what the company is about, your opportunities and how you’re going to operate as a business. It’s a really great way to get people on board.
Show your purpose. When anyone joins a company, one of the important decision-making factors in joining that company is feeling like you are joining a business that is providing a great product or service and a business that has the chance to be successful. For the people who are part of this business to know that the work they’re putting into making this business successful is actually paying off is something that is very positive. It reaffirms for many people why they joined up in the first place. Nobody wants to be a part of an organization that is struggling. They want to be a part of a company that is making consistent progress and is winning in their particular category.
That’s what we’ve done. We’re making consistent progress, even with the state of the economy, and we want to share that with our people so that they continue to be excited that they are a part of a growing, thriving business.
