What sets your company apart from the competition? Is it talent? Is it process? Is it a unique solution?
It is my experience that your company’s DNA is found in the collective strengths that each individual employee brings to the table. Building Employee Loyalty in your company is an important key to set your company apart from your competition.
On a recent visit to his alma mater, West Virginia University, the former executive chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, John Chambers stated, “Eighty percent of CEOs in America believe their company delivers superior customer service; twenty percent of the customers believe those same companies deliver superior customer service”.
This demonstrates a significant chasm between an executive’s view of their company and the industry reality.
Strategic Planning with Medical Device Executives
Most CEOs believe that their people set them apart from others in the industry. This belief is understandable when you consider that people and company culture are unique to each organization. But we know that all successful companies have both good and smart people or they wouldn’t be in business. Now I realize that many executives truly believe that their people are better than those working for other companies, but it’s more than that.
So, what makes the difference? Could it be less how executives see the organization and more how employees feel about the organization? It really comes down to how companies treat their employees. The critical factor may be knowing the difference between treating people like interchangeable capital and treating people like individuals.
Building Employee Loyalty | Employee-Centered Strategy
For generations, American businesses have instilled the necessity of treating people equally in order to be fair. How’s that working out? Employees are people, not machines and they want, need and deserve to be treated as such.
What’s important to one employee may not be important to another and treating all employees the same will not make your company better. However, if you identify what motivates each member of the team and focus on their individual strengths, that can make the difference between you and your competitor.
Paraphrasing Aristotle, it’s in the individual talents and unrestrained contributions of each member of the team, where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
The key to successful leadership is making people feel uniquely important to the purpose of the organization while connecting them to the larger team and the organization’s overall success.
Every job matters, and every person plays a role in accomplishing the mission.
Stephen Covey said, “You should treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers”.
The bottom line is this: we all want to be appreciated for who we are, not for who others want us to be. A company that celebrates the individual talents and contributions of its employees will not need to demonstrate why they’re better than the competition, their customers will accomplish that for them.
Forge Business Solutions, LLC | Executive Strategy
Evolving the culture of your company must be a fluid process and there is never a time when you have arrived. In order to continuously evaluate and mature your workforce, it is essential to develop and deploy an employee-centered strategy. Forge specializes in organizational and executive strategy. If you find that your company needs a strategy advisor, contact us.