Gaining Business Success Through Your Employees
Learning Without Scars is pleased to introduce our new guest writer, Arlen Swenson. He makes his blogging debut with LWS in “Gaining Business Success Through Your Employees.” Arlen is a seasoned, dynamic, competitive, influencer, motivator Sales and Marketing Executive. Track record of success recruiting, building, motivating, and managing highly effective teams, developing and implementing product marketing strategies to capture market share.
Success includes being Vice President of North American Governmental Sales & Marketing for John Deere Construction Equipment with annual sales of $255,000,000 while increasing sales 17% annually and reducing selling costs by more than 15% and improved gross profit margins by more than $38,000,000.00.
Gaining Business Success Through Your Employees
Many equipment dealerships struggle meeting or exceeding their business goals due to unforeseen or unknown barriers within their organization. Sometimes top management will make adjustments based on their experience or knowledge only to see negative or lackluster results even though employees are doing as directed.
But the answer to improving business performance is available if management is willing to ask from the right sources and that starts with their employees – all of them – all departments – all branch locations. This will require an open door by management to receive employee input in a constructive manner without threat of consequences for providing input.
This can be accomplished by conducting an open employee meeting with representatives from all departments and branch locations at each meeting conducted. The basic rules of the meeting include hearing input and recording on a flip chart that input from each meeting participant. The other rule is when an individual is providing their input they cannot be interrupted or challenged by the other meeting participants. The meeting chair or person entering the comments can ask clarification questions to make sure they are recording the input correctly.
This part of the process will take some time to accomplish and when each flip chart is filled, and line separated for each person’s comments each filled flip chart is then pasted on the meeting room wall. At the end of the process, you will have several flip charts pasted on the wall. It now time to gain group consensus on what are the top four items recorded on the flip charts that should be addressed immediately and solutions obtained. The remaining items will be addressed and resolved in descending order later, and all reported back to the employees.
To obtain group consensus each meeting participant is given four different colored pasty dots to place on the flip charts entries they believe are the first importance (red dot), second (green dot), third (yellow dot), and fourth (blue dot). Placing of the dots is done in quiet and no talking among the meeting participants. Management will than assign the four dotted items to two meeting participants for each colored dot to work with management on the best solutions for solving the business issue successfully. Progress on completing the top four issues is communicated back through the organization with frequent updates and announcement of completions. The other issues in descending order will be resolved with frequent updates and announcement of completions.
This open exchange of solving problems will become habit and add to the success of the business.