Rally around the vision
As you dialogue with employees and customers and begin to formulate your vision for where you need to take the company, your focus needs to start shifting toward how you’re going to roll the vision out to your employees.
Salfity kept his vision simply stated and attempted to rally his employees around some easy-to-remember bullet points — what he calls “battle cries.”
“One, I said that in the space we are in, we need to deliver solutions to our customers that allow them to manage costs and deliver solutions to their customers,” Salfity says. “Two, we needed to enable our customers to generate more revenue through new applications that they don’t have today. Three, the organization needed to understand that we’re here to find better ways to serve and delight our customers. From all of that, we formed the vision and the strategy.
“I have become convinced that you want these main things to become a battle cry for everyone in the organization — the guiding principles that people will fall back on when they’re not sure what to do. If something doesn’t support those three primary principles, we should question what we’re doing.”
Finding those several key rallying points is critical when you are trying to focus your entire company on a new vision and strategy. They really do need to be bullet points — accurate and high-impact, with little chance of losing anything in translation as the message cascades throughout the organization.
“Visions and strategies have to be simple,” Salfity says. “You shou
ld be able to sell your strategy to anyone that you get caught with in an elevator. You should be able to have them understand the strategy on the ride from the 10th floor to the lobby, which means your strategy should really fit on a single page.”
Stating your vision and future strategy should be a simple process because most of your collective energy as a company will be used to execute that strategy.
“Everyone internally and externally really needs to understand the strategy and the simplicity of it because the execution is really where the complexities come in,” Salfity says. “So you make it simple enough to communicate in an elevator ride, and that’s the genesis for pulling together and actually developing the road map that you’re going to execute on.”
To ensure that the strategy and vision are succinctly stated, you need to develop a well-defined outcome for which you are gunning and build metrics into the strategic plan that will tell you whether you are on pace to reach those goals.
“There are a couple of things you need to look at,” Salfity says. “To be sure that you’re executing the strategy properly, you need to have metrics and measurements in place that will measure business results. At the end of the day, the strategy and vision are about driving results. So we put together what we want the outcome to be from the strategy. Our revenue target within 12 months should be X, our EBITDA should be Y. So you put together the measurable metrics that you believe are fundamental, that tell you that the customers are happy and buying. That is the end outcome of the strategy.”
To maintain an organizationwide focus on your guiding strategic principles, you need to continue making face-to-face engagement of employees a priority. After Salfity set the tone by visiting Audatex’s field locations during his first 100 days as managing director, he has kept feeding the policy of face-to-face communication by continually building opportunities for interaction into his schedule and requiring the same of his management team.
“What I do along with my team is we communicate through personal touches,” Salfity says. “I’m walking around every morning, reiterating the mission of the company. When we have quarterly meetings with employees, I don’t do them alone. Our staff is there with me and they help talk about what we’re trying to accomplish. When we collectively get together and talk about our ideas and vision, it becomes something that everyone in the company can embrace and internalize. And my leadership team is doing the same thing when they meet with their own groups. They’re touching even more of their people that I’m not touching.”
The initial communication steps, and follow-up steps, taken by Salfity have helped him gain the trust, confidence and respect of his employees and customers, as he has transitioned from the new guy in town to an established leader with a long-term vision for Audatex.
“One of the things I’ve found is in today’s day and age, there is a lot of data that goes around, but it’s not necessarily information,” he says. “You have to make data relevant by how you communicate it with people. Data becomes information, information becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes wisdom.”
How to reach: Audatex North America Inc., (800) 366-4237 or www.audatex.us
