Put this on Your List of Key Leadership Tasks

Creating Employee Passion, is
Your Strategy Ready?

Note: One of your key leadership tasks is to be strategically ready to lead, today you will discover how. 

 

Does it frustrate you when you repeatedly communicate your plans to your employees yet the messages just don’t seem to get through?

 

What would it mean to you if every time you introduced a change in support of your strategy your employees always became actively engaged in making the change happen for you?

 

Imagine how successful your team will be when you start using our proven leadership techniques to ensure the messages that you prioritize get through every time .

 

 

 

Your leadership Tasks

þ Align your messages to your strategy

þ Make sure your messages get through

 

“What is the difference between a manager and a leader?” A great question frequently asked  by people who seek to develop their skills ….. and today you will discover one of the key differences.

Everyday you will have management and leadership tasks. One of your key leadership tasks is to identify the key items in your strategy that affect your people and to communicate these strategic priorities.

You will find many managers who actively walk through their business, engaging their people in idle or social discussion, which may include some discussion about work. These managers do not engage the minds of their people.

Management by Walking Around will help you to get into the mind of your people only if you are consistent with your communication themes. The best way for leaders to be consistent is to be strategic.

After reading every word of this leadership program, you will become skilled at sticking to the same communication themes. Your will then discover that your persistence will drive your passion and the passion of your people.

And, your people will know exactly what is important to you and your business….

 

Why Be Consistent?

One of your leadership tasks it to create an environment where your people can become passionate about your vision. It is hard for your people to be passionate about something different everyday. Your passionate and consistent reinforcement of the same themes will quickly rub off on your employees.

When you are consistent your peole will know exactly what is important to you and your messages will get through.

If you constantly change themes and messages your employees will learn that all things are important meaning nothing is particularly important.

Recap: Your leadership Tasks

o Align your messages to your strategy

o Identify your Strategic Priorities

o Identify You Strategic Sub Priorities 

þ Make sure your messages get through

 

 

MBWA, Management by Walking Around

Creating Employee Passion, is your strategy ready?

One of your most important leadership tasks is to be strategically ready

If you are going to spend time reinforcing key messages with your employees, through, Management by Walking Around, then it makes sense that you align your messages to your strategy.

Your key messages should stem from your identified business priorities (strategy) so that, overtime, when you are floor walking, you can stick to the same common themes and discuss the things that are of upmost importance to you or your business with your employees.

The term business priorities does not mean things like getting an urgent order out for a key customer today, it is referring to strategic or longer term business priorities, examples of strategic business priorities could be

Key Priorities

  • Improve process quality to ensure the customer gets a predictable service
  • Create a customer focused culture
  • Improve sales performance
  • Improve employee engagement
  • Improve Occupational Health and Safety performance

(You will notice a theme of improvement or making things better)
 

Use this space to enter the top 3 priorities for your business

First Priority

Second Priority 

Third Priority 

 

Recap: Your leadership Tasks

þ Align your messages to your strategy

þ Identify your Strategic Priorities

o Identify You Strategic Sub Priorities 

þ Make sure your messages get through

 

 

More on Your Priorities:

When identifying your business priorities you will need to think about priorities and sub priorities, this will help you get your level of thinking right.

 

Example:

 

If we stick with the Occupational Health & Safety, OH&S, theme

 

You may have a focus on improving manual handling over the next 6 months, OH&S would be the priority with manual handling the sub priority .

The reason for this distinction is simply ease of consistency, in this example you want to create a culture that values OH&S and everything that comes with it, but are currently working on improving manual handling. While doing your MBWA, management by walking around you will communicate with your employees about your OH&S initiative – manual handling.

 

Priority and Sub Priority Examples:

Key Priority - "Improving sales performance" and you are currently working on (sub priorities)

 

Key Priority

Sub Priorities

Improving Sales Performance
  • Improving cross selling within your product range
  • Introducing up-selling to existing clients
  • Getting more referrals from your clients

 

 


Or, Key Priority - "Improving Occupational Health and Safety performance" and you are currently working on (sub priorities)

 

Key Priority

Sub Priorities

Improving Occupational Health and Safety performance
  • Improving the reporting of hazards
  • Focusing on improving manual handling technique
  • Lifting the standard of house keeping 

 

 

Or, Key Priority – “Improving customer service” and you are currently working on (sub priorities)

 

Key Priority

Sub Priorities

Improving customer service
  • Improving your greeting
  • Thanking customers for their business
  • Reducing the use of hold/wait time

 

 

In your MBWA, management by walking around program, you will pick the key priority, from the first example above, improving sales rather than the sub priority improving cross selling as your theme.

 

Complete the table below for your business environment

Priority

Sub Priority

 

Print this form when you have completed your list of priorities and sub priorities

 

Recap: Your leadership Tasks

þ Align your messages to your strategy

þ Identify your Strategic Priorities

þ Identify You Strategic Sub Priorities 

þ Make sure your messages get through

 

 

 

Will these priorities change?

 

You will have a group of priorities that will rarely change but your sub priorities will change frequently, the art of the good leader is to draw from the common theme and make the link for your employees.

 

For example: The current message might be “we are reviewing our customer service standards and I would like to discuss with you our new customer greeting” and in one years time you might have a message like “we are reviewing our customer service standards and I would like to discuss with you how you are finding the new on hold initiative”

Occasionally you will need to change one of your business priorities, this has only happened to me when my teams have embraced the theme and have commenced driving their own continuous improvement on the theme.

 

How to influence your poeple by incorporating your Strategic Planning

If you have read the “what makes a good leader” guide on industry environment analysis, you will recall that industry knowledge is useful to help with your MBWA, management by walking around.

 

Your industry analysis will often provide a compelling reason for your people to rally for the cause, not only influcencing your people to support your direction, but also building company pride.

 

For example:

 

If you have a business priority to improve quality and you know from your industry analysis that your business may be faced with new entrants to your market you can use this information as a positive motivator

 

“to stave of competition in our traditional markets we can differentiate ourselves on quality”

 

Management by Walking Around: Examples

Example: Production Environment Observation

 

If OH&S is important and you walk through your production environment and observe someone using poor manual handling process you can stop them and show them how to lift saftely and why it is important to do so.

 

Or

 

If quality is important you can ask employees on your walk how quality is going, can we improve?

 

Repetitive reinforcement on your floor walks will reinforce your priorities. Employees only take a few weeks to become focused on what they think is important to their leader.

Example: Sales Call Centre Communication

If you place a high priority on conversion in a sales call centre then every time you talk to someone you need to include discussion on conversion,

 

“How is your conversion going?”

“What can we do to help your conversion?”

“Hey I saw your conversion is up this month! Well done”

 

Alternatively if you are trying to improve cross-selling then every conversation needs to have some element of cross-selling in it.

Example: Customer facing staff

If you think it is important that all staff have a visible name tag, when floor walking you may observe people with their tag obscured by long hair, a tie or a scarf – just to name a few, you can ask them to have their name tag on display and the reasons why.  

Summary

Your stragegy is ready, when you know what your top three priorities and sub priorities are.

Recap: Your leadership Tasks

þ Align your messages to your strategy

þ Identify your Strategic Priorities

þ Identify You Strategic Sub Priorities 

þ Make sure your messages get through

To return from this "creating employee passion, is your strategy ready" page to our site home page

Click here to read about other leadership tasks

 
 
 

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