Todd Siegel says that his
key to leadership sounds simple, but that there’s more to it than the words.
The president and CEO of
MTS Medication Technologies
Inc. says that he tries to create
a vision that reflects a direction for MTS, which provides
medication compliance packing systems and posted
approximately $50 million in
fiscal 2008 revenue. But the
job doesn’t stop with creating
the vision. After that, you need to work with managers and
direct reports to really lay out
the strategic objectives to
meet that vision.
Once that is done, you start
breaking those down in details
from goals, strategies and initiatives, and then take that
information and distill it into a
strategic plan. That not only
brings clarity to the vision and
shows everybody how their
road reaches that vision, but it
allows everybody to participate
in the process and buy in to it.
Smart Business spoke with
Siegel about how he communicates his vision to his employees without overwhelming
them.
Remember to communicate. The
worst thing you can do as a
leader is not communicate
with your organization, not
be visible and not communicate. I think that if you allow
silos and departmental barriers to be built up in your
organization that you’re
going to create a culture that
is not conducive to success.
The technology age has
negatively impacted that. It
drives me nuts when I see a
two-page e-mail sent from
somebody and they are two
offices down. I’m constantly
badgering people not to send
e-mails of that nature.
It’s OK if you want to document and there’s information
you need to pass on, but
really, think carefully about
that before you sit down and type. I try to get my managers out of their offices or
making sure my managers
are out of their offices and
working with individuals, not
getting jammed up in meetings — meeting after meeting after meeting.
Most of them are pretty
good. But, you have to set a
style, and that’s always been
my style. When I get in in the
morning, I’m going to go
drop by their offices. If there
is something going out on a
shop floor, we’ll walk out to
the shop floor together and
take a look at it.
Make sure we’re seen,
they’re seen — everybody
knows that you’re interested
in what’s going on. <<
Keep your vision simple. Creating
a vision is the responsibility of
the chief executive. They’ve
got to know what that vision
is. But, you still can’t do it in a
vacuum.
You still have to work with
your executive team so you
can distill it into words that
people can look at and say,
‘Yeah, I get it, No.1, and, (No.
2), I want to be a part of that.’
So, particularly entrepreneurial businesses, a lot of them
are founded on ideas, and a lot
of them are founded in an
industry that has absolutely
nothing to do with the business that they’re actually in.
Somebody finds some opportunity, or they develop an
opportunity based on an obstacle they had to overcome. An
entrepreneur has this in their
mind, and they’ve got to build a
staff around that or business
around that to make it happen.
How do you do that?
You’re recruiting people;
you’re articulating what it is
you want to do. They like it,
they buy in, but once you’ve
got an organization and you’ve
got this machine that is moving in the direction to fulfill
these ideas or these dreams
that you’ve articulated, you’ve
got to really distill it into something that is clear and meaningful that people can look at,
and read and they get it.
You have to post it and you
have to reiterate it. It has to be
everywhere. When I started, I
used to go nuts. I’d walk into
businesses and they’d have
their vision statement up and
it’d be five paragraphs or all
these bullets, and it’d be on a
poster in the lobby, and some
would say, ‘vision statement’
and some would say, ‘mission’
and I’d always ask, ‘Do you
know what your vision is or your mission?’ Invariably, they
wouldn’t know. This would be
some senior-level person.
I said, ‘If we go down this
path, I want to make sure that
people, if they don’t know it
word for word, they can get
pretty darn close to what that
vision is.’
