Enlighten & Align Employees to Increase Their Strategic Effectiveness
en-light-en: 1. to give the light of knowledge to; free from ignorance, prejudice, or superstition. 2. to inform; give clarification to (a person) as to meanings, intentions, etc. Slang - wise up.
a-lign: 1. to bring into a straight line. 2. to bring into agreement, co-operation, etc.
The bottom-line effectiveness of business leaders and employees will not be substantially increased unless they are consistently making the right decisions and taking the right actions. Many highly "productive" employees are just spinning their wheels because they are heading in the wrong direction. Some may actually be harming your company’s success by wasting the time and resources of other employees, missing improvement opportunities, creating less appealing products or services, causing or not solving customer support problems, and ultimately losing more prospective and existing customers due to offering inferior value.
pro-duc-tive: having the quality or power of producing especially in abundance.
ef-fec-tive: producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect.
To be productive and effective, your employees require up-to-date and precise information on your target customers’ priorities and your corresponding strategies in order to consistently make the right decisions and take the right actions to produce meaningful contributions toward your company’s goals. Well-designed and executed Employee Enlightenment & Alignment initiatives produce substantial savings, impressive customer gains, and other relatively immediate benefits compared to the status quo and to other internal development initiatives.
Enlighten & Align Your Employees in All Key Groups
The millions of work-related decisions made collectively by employees across your various organizational groups have a dramatic impact on the ultimate success of your strategic plan and, as a result, in achieving your company’s short-term and long-term goals. Most, if not all, employees make several work-related decisions every day. Some make decisions which have greater impact on company success than others, but even employees at the lowest levels have to regularly make decisions and take actions which effect your company's bottom-line success.
Enlighten & Align Your Employees on Precise Customer Requirements
Because the strategies and plans found in company strategic plans are predominantly general in content, they leave plenty of space for different interpretations by business leaders and individual employees who are involved in their implementation and fulfillment. While the strategic plan establishes your company’s overall priorities, your company’s processes and employees must somehow accommodate all the needs of all prospective and existing customers. Furthermore, your employees must fulfill customer needs at very precise levels (i.e., C and D).
There are an enormous number of specific performance attributes that your employees must address in some manner. In the absence of precise strategic plan direction and definitive customer priority details, on what basis have the millions of employee decisions been made in the past? Mostly wild guesses.
Even absolutely brilliant general strategies and plans will not produce the desired results if the millions of subsequent decisions made by your leaders and employees are not truly in-sync with your target customers’ priorities. In this light, it is easy to understand why the vast majority of companies fail to execute their strategies effectively each year.
On the other hand, providing your employees with accurate and precise information on the relevant customer priorities will yield millions of “just right” decisions which can directly lead to enormous cost savings, significant sustainable customer demand gains, and other major improvements for your company stakeholders.
Achieve True Strategic Alignment
Comprehensive alignment of your employees is one of the most beneficial outcomes from enlightenment initiatives. Enlightened employees become simultaneously aligned with [1] your company’s strategies and plans, [2] your target customers’ priorities, and [3] each other. Complete strategic synchronization is the term we use to describe this end-state among enlightened employees. It goes well beyond basic strategy alignment. Your enlightened employees will operate under the same set (or “tree”) of facts and insights on your customers’ general and precise needs, priorities and preferences. As a result of this widely-shared definitive knowledge base, little room is left for conflicts and effectiveness barriers which result from differences in …
l Customer data or information
l Past experience or claimed expertise
l Personal opinions or gut feelings
l Personal backgrounds or cultures
l Personal or group self-interests
Enlightening & Aligning Your Employees for Greater Success
Many significant improvements are realized by company stakeholders from well-designed and implemented Enlightenment & Alignment initiatives. Your employees benefit from greater job satisfaction and enrichment as well as improved recognition, self-esteem and security, while your entire company and shareholders benefit from the greater bottom-line results caused by improved productivity and strategic effectiveness of your company's leaders and employees.
A complete version of this discussion titled "Employee Effectiveness by Design" is available. Send an email with the request to info@demandfacts.com, or download a copy at Northeast Human Resources Association's web site under Learning & Development Competency (click here).
Realize the Full Potential of Your Strategies & Plans
If your strategies and plans are not achieving your company's business goals, the problem may be due to ineffective implementation and execution. The best approach to solve that problem is outlined on the Execution Imperatives page.
