As a leader, you have vision. That vision allows you to think and see far ahead, to be able to pave your company’s way into prosperity and growth into the future.
And also as that leader, you also know what steps, big or small, that your organization needs to take to move towards that ultimate goal.
And within your organization, you have many team members that are part of the business.
Those team members, are then divided up into their own smaller units, such as for example, the sales team, the HR team, the finance team, the executive team, the customer service team, etc.
For the most part, everyone within those teams knows their individual role. They know exactly what their duties are to accomplish the tasks of that job.
It’s normal that a customer service agent doesn’t necessarily interact with someone from the finance department on a regular occasion. Most of the time, people within that smaller unit only interact amongst themselves and their department managers.
Your Employees Must Know The Longer Vision
The important thing is if you want your organization to prosper, to really grow, you as the leader, need to do one important thing – and that is ensure that your entire company knows the absolute long term direction the company is going.
Why is this important? If everyone just does their job, puts their heads down, and doesn’t know why they are doing what they are doing, they will not have the conviction, nor the purpose to do the best job they can.
You see, we as humans are tribal creatures. We work really well with other people to accomplish great things.
And for your company to be able to accomplish great things, people need to know why they do what they do.
The key to great leadership is to be able to portray and instil the vision of the future, into those who are doing it today. Those who work hard day in and day out to do the best job they can.
In order to ensure everyone is on the right track, everyone must know the direction the company is going.
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Take a ship for example, there must be a clear path of travel from point A to point B. As a captain of that ship, you must be able to ensure that the entire crew, and their individual efforts are all performing tasks, projects, and duties, that collectively mesh together in the end and get the entire ship, the crew, and the passengers there safely.
Avoid Silos Within The Company Departments
A way to ensure that there is a collective purpose within the organization is through regular company meetings talking about what each person is working on within their department so others know what the rest of the departments are doing.
This is really important. For the most part of someones day, they are just focused on the tasks they are doing, not realizing the cross departmental affects this has on other teams in other parts of the company.
At the end of the day, an effective leader is able to show that the good and bad that may happen in one department can have very positive, or very negative consequences in another department.
Say for example, a new billing system is being developed by the IT team. If then there is a new version release, yet the IT team does not relay that information to say, the customer service department, this can have enormous consequences if there are bugs or errors within the release.
With those newly introduced bugs, the customer service team now has major issues processing payments, and refunds through customer accounts. Now imagine being a customer service agent having to deal with angry customers when payments cant be taken, with customers complaining about the situation.
This will then trickle up to the managers who then will have numerous customers who will want to escalate those calls up to find a resolution. That will now take up so much time managers will have to use up instead of them focusing on other things.
From there, inbound payments will be down, affecting the finance department when they will now have to find other ways people can send in their payments.
It Takes Many Bricks To Build A Wall
Now this is a very detailed example, but can easily be a real situation in most companies.
This all began because each department worked amongst themselves, with the left hand, not knowing what the right hand was doing. With also one department, the IT department, not sharing why they are even working on a new billing system in the first place. The reason could be to help speed up payment processing times, so customer service agents could take more calls.
But for a customer service agent, if the upper management doesn’t share this vision of being able to process more daily customer interactions, then the customers service agents themselves, will instead see this new billing system as nothing more than a hindrance of them trying to do their jobs.
By having regular cross departmental meetings, customer service would have at least known that a developer in the IT department was working on the payments module, so that when the issue came up, they would have at least known why the error was happening instead of being taken by surprise because of the situation, therefore better relaying what was happening to the customers calling in.
As a leader of an organization, whether that be the CEO themselves, or even a manager, it is vital to be able to always remind and share with the team the longer team goals, strategies, and vision that the company has in order to keep the morale high, the team members excited, and the unity strong.
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