Are you on the same page?

Success cannot be obtained if your stakeholders don’t approve of your methods and aims.

Running a thriving company is a collaborative project, so make sure your partners, colleagues and clients buy-in to what you’re selling. This doesn’t have to mean your product or service, as much as the ethos and goals of your organisation. Different aspects will be relevant to different groups and finding the balance between these varying targets can be a challenge.

You want people to clearly understand what to expect from your business, so everyone can recognise the progress you are making and help to push in that one, unified direction.

A limiting mindset – Division at the top

First, it’s vital those at the top of your organisation share your thoughts on where you are currently, where you’re going and how you intend to get there.

Shareholders will be primarily concerned with profitability. They need to feel assured that whatever activities you are proposing will provide a return on their investment. This is a good place to start, because it will ensure that you have nailed down the practicalities and forecasted ahead. It can be easy to get carried away by engaging plans, but taking this necessary analytical viewpoint should reduce the chance of pitfalls further down the line.

Don’t exclude any members of your leadership team. There will always be disagreements on best approach; talk through your disparate opinions and try your hardest to find some common ground. Some ideas will always be flawed, so try to explain as transparently as possible why you have decided to choose a different path. These people will have great influence on your less senior employees, so make sure everyone is reading from the same hymn sheet.

A missing element – Direct contact

Once you have recruited your shareholders and core team to your cause, focus on your wider staff.

As organisations grow communication becomes more complex; this is just the nature of involving more people. Messages can be distorted as they pass from person to person. Therefore, it’s important you dedicate some time to directly communicating with those in more junior roles, to check if you’re on the same page. Isolating yourself from your employees can cultivate an ‘us and them’ mentality, which will result in decreased engagement and productivity.

Align your wider company goals with smaller personal targets. For example, if you are aiming for a certain return from your sales team in a month, reward your best seller with prize, or take them all out for a meal if they’ve worked particularly hard. Make them see that what you want and what they want are intrinsically connected. Show them that they have a vital part to play and you can’t achieve your joint vision without their help.

A different perspective – Ideal clients

Clients or customers must buy in to your business model and what you provide, otherwise you’ll make no money. It’s as simple as that.

The relationship you have with this stakeholder group is different to those above. They’re not interested in the mechanics of how you achieve things as long as you give them what they want. It’s true that modern marketing is more focused on the team behind the scenes and having environmentally ethical processes is an increasing concern, but if your product or service is below standard these things are meaningless.

Therefore, to ensure your clients are aligned with your business, you have to understand them. What current trends are they demonstrating? What features do they value most? What additional support, such as FAQs or returns policies do they require?

On the flip side of this, don’t be tempted to hunt new customers that don’t fit your mould. If they want something your company cannot give them, this issue will likely arise fairly quickly. Consequently, they will require too much attention and provide insufficient returns from your initial investments onboarding them.

Likeminded people produce the best results when they work together. This is a fact. If you can get your key stakeholders to share your vision, then every process will run more efficiently and each target will be easier to meet.

Ask yourself: What would make them buy in?