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Companies say ‘Teamwork’ all the time but rarely have it.
When my partner, Jessica Rich, and I took over the day-to-day management of our company, one thing became clear. Direction. We needed to clarify for ourselves the direction in which we wanted to take the organization. This included a review of our Mission, the creation of our future Vision and developing a business plan for the new year ahead. It was a new area of responsibility for us as the new leaders of our company.
As with any change in leadership of a company, we knew it would be important for our short and long-term success that we comfort employees, build trust and gain their buy-in to what the future holds. We are new leaders. We know we cannot simply bark orders from the comfort of our desks in the hopes that people will listen, respond and respect us. The reality is, sure, we could have done that, but in order to have the greatest success in the shortest amount of time, we knew we needed to develop that employee buy-in. Getting employees to work with us and as a team to achieve the goals we set out to accomplish, we needed to make sure we were all on the same page. The quickest way to failure is skipping this step. The reason why this can be so detrimental is that you can experience employee pushback. Pushback can stall or completely derail the initiatives that were set out to be accomplished as the employees question the decisions and directive to change. When new leadership comes into the fold, changes are going to be made and long-time employees may not like the new changes that are about to be made.
"We are new leaders. We know we cannot simply bark orders from the comfort of our desks in the hopes that people will listen, respond, and respect us."
So how can we, as the new leadership team, ensure that the changes we are about to implement are well received and are executed in the most efficient manner possible? By getting that employee buy-in. We achieved this by putting together our Business Plan for the upcoming year. It included our typical strategic initiatives and goals as well as our Mission. We also took the time to define our Vision and our Core Values. We shared this plan with every single employee. We reviewed it together and encouraged our employees to make sure that, if they questioned what they were doing on a given day, that if it didn’t line up with our strategic priorities, to stop doing it. By sharing this plan with every employee and reviewing it together, it provides a very clear direction as to where we are heading. It brought clarity to every individual which aligns purpose in each role. Employees no longer questioned how their role played a part in our overall success; they knew.
As a service-based company, it is critical that our employees are on the same page, working together and are happy. If we expect to deliver the best services around, happy employees are the key. In fact, we recently competed for Best Places to Work in Connecticut and am proud to say we took 1st place out of the top 25 -- and after only our first year in this new leadership position!
I’ve heard from people over the years and have experienced it in my own life at various points in my career -- the dreaded ‘team-building exercise” or the ‘We work as a team’ or ‘We have great teamwork’. How many times have you heard this in your own career? Probably more than you’d like to admit and more than you can probably even remember. How effective were those sessions?
Here at our company, we don’t say ‘teamwork’. In fact, we don’t even try to hold team-building events or exercises. The fact is, you either have it or you don’t. Putting employees through these exercises is often a waste of time and money and rarely get the result companies are looking for. But if you don’t have it, how do you establish ‘teamwork’? To establish the effect of working as one cohesive team we may have gotten lucky but, we believe it was established because we achieved employee buy-in right out of the gate, by sharing our vision and where we wanted to take the company. We shared our expectations of the level of service we wanted to provide to our clients and, by doing so, our employees know their purpose and what part they play in the overall success of the company. Because of employee engagement, clear direction, and vision, we are all rowing in the same direction working together as one. This is how we achieved ‘Teamwork’.
written by:
Todd Bailey
Todd Bailey, Managing Partner at The Walker Group, has an extensive technical and business background in the areas of IT Infrastructure and Management, Service Delivery, Cybersecurity and Marketing. He is a passionate problem solver dedicated to continuous improvement, best-in-class service delivery and optimizing technology and business operations for all of The Walker Group's clients.
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