When your employees see your company’s success as their own, they will work harder, work better and push themselves to achieve more time and again. This is all great but imagine how many companies actually reach this level of employee investment — few.
How can you encourage your employees to invest in your company’s success? It takes a three-part recipe of consistency, accountability and a sense of urgency.
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Consistency:
Are you executing a consistent process? Is your leadership team delivering a consistent message? When leadership is consistent with process and messaging, your employees have greater confidence in your leadership and the company. Consistency fosters trust, enforces predictability and builds responsibility — which are pillars for excellence. When they can count on your actions and the company, they hold themselves more accountable, which brings us to…
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Accountability:
Accountability is not top-down — it is a two-way street. Some leaders talk big but never back it up. Leaders need to hold themselves and their employees accountable, and employees likewise need to hold themselves and their leaders accountable. In the real world, accountability is also horizontal, that is professionals, teams and operational departments supporting one another and holding one another accountable to the dependencies. To achieve a culture of accountability, read up on the CEO of Vistage Sam Reese’s blog post, “Accountability Starts at the Top.”
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Urgency:
Inaction can be a trap hiding in the busyness of a packed calendar. Activity is great, but activity without purpose is false hope. That’s where urgency comes in. You need to create targets, goals and objectives with short-term and long-term deadlines. For example, your sales team needs to land so many new deals by quarter-end, or marketing needs to find X new quality leads by June. Without the urgency (which is underpinned by accountability and consistency), the targets slip and objectives are missed. And when these misses have implications for individuals, the team and the organization as a whole — that is something with which everyone can relate.
If the entire company fails to invest themselves in the company’s revenue performance, things will not run as they should. Though there is more to a company than revenue performance, all of those other things work together to influence the state of the company’s healthy growth. And when employees understand that, they have a better, more straightforward goal to get behind — because your company’s revenue performance success is every employee’s revenue performance success.