Define Your Company
I have an important question for you: Are your employees performing their jobs in a way that is consistent with why customers buy from you?
It may sound like a strange question. But think about it – if employees are not performing in a way that’s consistent with customer expectations, it’s probably because they’re not aligned with – or maybe do not even know – your definition of value or your strategic direction. If either, or both, is the case, you’re wasting capacity, and, ultimately, capital.
No business can afford to waste either of those resources.
Defining your business is a key step to guaranteeing employees align with not only your strategy, but also your customer expectations.
Where and how do you start to define a company?
Take in a stakeholder perspective
First, look internally, and externally, to understand how stakeholders view your company. At that examination, ask yourself the following questions:
How well does our team’s performance represent our industry?
- How well does our team’s performance represent our industry?
- How well does our team’s performance serve the functional area that drives decisions.
- How well does our team’s performance align with our strategic choices?
- Does our organizational design enable or detract from efforts?
Seek to find the direct causes and influences of a company’s brand
In most industries, presentation is everything. (Well, almost everything.) A company’s brand has a look and feel to it that not only resembles a certain image in people’s minds AND represents the solution.
How you present your product or service goes a long way to create customers, but if in the end it doesn’t deliver the solution, people will stop buying.
Defining what kind of company you have gets to the heart of creating, and delivering, the solution-forward aspect of your brand.
When solving problems alongside clients, I have four main areas that examine:
Industry: Commodity to Differentiated Grouping
Internal functional dominance: Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Engineering, Operations, Logistics
Strategy/Strategic Intent: Trusted Brand, Customer Intimacy, or Operational Excellence
- Offering: How is it Created and Delivered
- Experience: Shopping, Purchasing, Using, End of Useful Life
Organizational Design:
- Organizational Infrastructure and Methods
- Organizational Factors
Now that you’ve considered these four areas of your business, it’s time to start taking action.
Define the gap of where you are and how you want consumers to behave differently
This is the fun part – where you realize that you are doing a great deal of things right.
However, the issue most organizations have is what they are doing right is used as an excuse to not change the other parts of the business. We have a tendency to shy away from our shortcomings and double down on our strengths.
By failing to improve all the direct causes, your team spends more time and resources than necessary. That can look like: you are spending money on activities your customers will not reimburse you for; or your team is struggling to admit something they’re challenged by.
This flawed approach may work for a while. But, new challenges constantly present themselves; or old solutions just don’t quite fit. By understanding what you mean to your customers, and how you meet their needs, the basis of your competitive advantage begins to make itself known.
Defining your business is critical for everyone, but it’s important for your employees because, with that clarity, they will be able to focus on delivering on your brand promise. Reconciling what your employees and customers believe is important – it should be a primary focus for improvement efforts.
If you’d like to consider adopting one of the popular change initiatives, think about how much time it will take to roll that out on top of making the actual improvements. Meaningful, lasting change occurs when the focus stays on creating value–as leadership helps employees work together.
Read about people-focused capabilities for aligning employee efforts: Maximize People-Focused Capabilities and Solve Supply Chain Issues
