Michael B. Romano realizes
it’s not enough to simply know where you’re heading in
business.
As president and CEO of
Associated Material Handling
Industries Inc., he’s learned that
everyone working under him
also needs to know that direction because if everyone understands the ultimate goals, then
they can work collectively to
achieve them. He equates it to a
basketball team where everyone
plays a different position, but if
everyone plays their position well, then the team wins.
To ensure equal playing time
for his employees, he works
with members of his management team to create a vision for
the organization and then allows
them to develop ways to achieve
it. He says that if he mandated
everything, nobody would care
about those things. But by creating solutions themselves,
employees are more inclined to
get things done at the material
handling storage company,
which posted 2007 revenue of
$117 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Romano about how to effectively create a vision for your
organization and get everyone
playing on the same page.
Create a vision. You first have to
look at what is the purpose of
your organization. The vision
should answer, ‘What is the
need an organization is trying to
address? How is your organization differentiated? What makes
it unique?’ Then you should consider and address, ‘Who are the
beneficiaries of what you do?’
There should be a purpose
statement, which basically says
what the organization seeks to
accomplish, why does it exist,
and then there should be an
activity description — what
exactly is the business? Many
companies get sidetracked and
get involved in unproductive
activities because they’re working outside their core competencies because they haven’t truly
defined what their business
activity is.
Then, beyond that, the mission
and vision should include and
consider the cultural values that
you find important and that you
would like the organization to
hold in common and endeavor
to practice. That would begin to
establish your culture.
The vision can be categorized
in those three areas — the purpose, the business and the values. If someone thinks in terms
of those three areas and answers
some questions in those three
areas, that’s when they start getting their hands around their
future vision.
Revisit that vision. I and our organization must embrace our strategic planning process. It starts
with setting a vision and mission for the organization. It then
goes through evaluating the environment in which we operate,
both internally and externally.
We do this every year, and
then, based on opportunities
that we feel we have in the marketplace or possible shortcomings, we develop initiatives that
drive individual departments to
develop their own goals and
strategies to fulfill those.
Visit that every year and challenge it. We may tweak our mission statement based on things
that we’re trying to stress. That’s
actually done at the beginning
of our planning process because
we want to make sure that the
plans we then develop the following year are allowing us to
constantly work toward that
vision that we’ve established.
Get buy-in. It’s not only my vision
but the vision of executive management, and, if we’ve done it
right, the vision shared by all
employees.
The key is to make sure that
everyone in the organization,
from technician to general manager, are in the process, so they’re
bought in to the process, they
feel they have contributed to the
development of the plan, and
they fully understand their role
in the execution and the success
of the plan. That is fundamental
to the whole empowerment.
We bring the planning process
all the way down to the individual through the performance review process. The employee is
reviewed every year on how
they perform relative to their
contribution to their department’s plan.
Every employee within a
department knows not only the
department plan but their role
in it. At the end of the year,
that’s ultimately how they’re judged.
It goes back to the buy-in.
These are not top-driven. The
vision is top-driven, but the rest
of the plan, all the way down to
the department level, is developed by those people, so that’s
the key — their involvement.
Review employees. The employee
performance review is simply an
embodiment of that department’s
goals and strategies, so when an
employee looks at their review
form, they see their department’s goals and strategies.
A manager is supposed to
review all of those with them and
agree as to what areas they’re
going to be involved in. What is
their role? Those areas are then
marked as applicable, and that’s
what the employee gets reviewed
on the following year.
That employee review process
is what creates the employee
traction with the planning process because it forces the manager to review the goals and
strategies for their department
and to make sure the employee
knows their role in the execution
of the plan. You then let a good
employee, who has the basic
skills and capabilities, go out and
do the job and make decisions
and receive coaching and mentoring when they need it. …
If they understand what they do
[and] … what their department
contributes to the overall organization, all of a sudden, they feel
a part of this. That’s what it’s all
about — creating that inclusion-ary environment.
HOW TO REACH: Associated Material Handling Industries Inc., www.associated-allied.net or (877)
628-9705.
