People are the only reason everything happens. You might think that some people may be driven by money, or power, but those are just means to have influence over other people.
A very common misconception is that the culture of a company belongs to the company. For better or worse, a CEO typically pushes certain behaviors within the company, and HR summarizes them into a very digestible text, baptizing it as the ‘company culture.’ The CEO is a person, HR is made up of people, the directors who endorse that culture and the employees who follow, accept, and embrace it often to avoid being fired are all people too.
Understanding people’s perspectives is critical to your business’s success. Yes, meeting customer expectations is important, but understanding your employees’ expectations is equally, if not more, vital. While it’s true that everyone is replaceable, replacing someone comes at a cost. And I’m not just talking about the expense of hiring and training a replacement. There’s the cost of failed projects, the hit to your company’s reputation on review sites, and the risk of losing other employees who leave to follow someone who was fired let go because they didn’t understand the goals of a transformational project, or because the new policies just didn’t make sense to them.
Caring about your employees is as important as caring about your customers. Training an employee takes time: it’s a long-term investment. Just as a customer can choose to spend their money elsewhere (as Sam Walton once said), an employee can take their skills and experience to another company. And as a manager, if your team doesn’t deliver results, then you don’t deliver results. Unless you know where the skeletons are hidden, there’s rarely room for managers who can’t deliver.
Operational excellence is an art… a kind of dance. Great managers chase it, adapting to the rhythm of the feedback they receive. What feedback? The insights and opinions shared by your team. Knowing how to listen to them is critical to success: yours and the company’s. More importantly, silence can be a dangerous form of feedback too.
How often do you truly listen to your people? What help do you need to turn feedback into action? Write to me at luisborin@luisborin.com or use the form below.