Setting the success tone for your landscape company starts with the person at the top. Defining the top priorities, planning the growth process and staying the course are what will lead to the company’s overall success. You must have a way to track progress, and know what progress looks like so you can know it when you see it. You have to make sure everyone has time each week to work on those top priorities. You must encourage your TEAM to practice at making bigger and better decisions. When planning, you must allow for breakdowns and recovery time, but demand that each mistake leads to getting smarter and quicker. As leader of your company, people are likely to follow the lead.
Sometimes sacrificing a small amount of productivity in order to develop ways to become smarter, more error free, faster, more productive is a way to prevent bigger challenges down the road.
A few steps to success include:
Paint a picture of what company success looks like. Work with managers and employees to identify the top factors and actions that will lead to success. Get people engaged by talking realistically about the challenges and then brainstorm ways to get from where you are to where you want to be.
Ask your people to take calculated risks. If they get it wrong, ask them to fix it. Start small. Build confidence for both yourself and the people who work for you. The more that people around you can take on, the freer you will be to work on even bigger things, like building your business.
Build in time for errors and recovery. Part of learning is adjusting. If you haven’t seen someone do something well in the past, that does not mean they could not do it better in the future. Plan extra time and resources to allow for the learning curve to take hold.
Set up KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, to make sure that everyone knows what’s being measured. Graph performance vs. KPIs so that it’s obvious when improvements are taking hold and when more help is needed to figure out better solutions. Celebrate the wins, and use them to build everyone’s confidence that things are getting better.
Plan for it. Seems pretty obvious but in many cases the plan focus is on the event: the roll out of the new initiative. When you introduce new initiatives, the changes you are making can be to very deeply entrenched processes or approaches. Spending 2 or 3 days a week to roll out the new initiative and then expect to have it take root organically, it just isn’t going to just happen. In addition to the launch and implementation, your plan needs to outline how and when audits will occur and what measurements you’ll use to track progress. As well, your plan needs to outline how you will make any necessary course corrections. For sustained success, develop a plan and focus on the long-term, not just the roll out.
Communicate expectations. Make sure everyone in the organization understands the significance of the initiative, how it supports the organization’s objectives, and what’s in it for them. Ensure everyone knows what the expectations are, what they are expected to contribute, and what success looks like. Outline the training, resources and support available to help make sure the initiative lasts. Deliver regular updates on how things are progressing to reinforce expectations.
Management commitment. Management personnel need to be committed to the effort. They need to walk the proverbial walk, and be able to confidently convey the benefits of the initiative and how it supports the vision of the organization. However, it doesn’t stop there. To insure an initiative’s success within the organization, executives must be active. They need to consistently advocate, stay connected and interact with employees, champion the initiative, and consistently reinforce the benefit.
Incentives and acknowledgement. Once employees know what is expected of them, know what success looks like, offering incentives can go a long way in helping sustain your efforts. Incentives don’t have to be costly. They can be as simple as, hit a KPI and it is a luncheon, a small gift/movie tickets, a gift card, or some other means of acknowledgement. The key is making it worth their while and sustained efforts remain front and center.
Evaluate, adjust, and stay committed. As you implement your initiative, evaluate your progress. Are you where you want to be? Is the effort meeting expectations? Based on your evaluation, make any necessary adjustments to ensure it sustains. Perhaps you may need to provide additional training; maybe it is one-on one-coaching, or additional communications. The key is to remember is sustained success takes effort. Consistently evaluate your progress, be flexible, be prepared to provide new or additional resources, and stay committed.
So what’s your attitude like these days? Committed, focused and driving forward to the prize? Are your concerns about the business just problems to work on solving? Having reservations about the future success of the company is normal. How those reservations are presented to those around you is what counts. When you look at the future do you communicate to others that you see potential? Are you filling positions in the company with people who are capable of helping you to solve the company’s problems? Do you embrace change as a necessary part of the company’s evolution?
Don’t let your initiative fall in to the “flavor of the month” category; increase the success by planning, communicating, commitment, incentives, and evaluating and adjusting.
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