I strongly believe that a sign of a sustainable business is the ability of every employee to know "how things are done" in that business.
How things are done does not just mean processes relevant to that employee's work but also the implicit values and ethics that support the business and aligning them. For example, whether every employee is encouraged to think about what they do and whether it can be systematised and improved for the benefit of customers, how customers are treated from their first encounter right through the provision of a service and the amount of time and money invested in researching new products and services are all indications of a customer-focussed culture. Employees must understand how your business provides value to customers.
Management consultant David Maister argues that businesses succeed not because of leaders (because most people don't want to be lead) but "because they were able to get even highly talented, extraordinarily mobile people to rally around a fervently held, common way of doing things – a world view, a philosophy, a set of principles, values or standards."
Great leaders... get people to focus on the key elements of strategy – the standards on which the firm is going to compete. With a clear ideology to rally around, talented people get the choice of saying – ‘I can believe in that. I think I’ll stick around to be a part of that and be a member of a society of like-minded people operating together in accordance with common values.’ That commitment, in company after company, has led to service line and market sector choices no-one anticipated, because they were not the guts of the strategy, but rather the outcome of the strategy – the firm’s own way of doing things.
Do your employees know the ways things are done in your business and is that communicated to every new employee?
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