Business Vision: Weekly Tips to Make Your Dream Company a Reality (Part 3)

In our last blog, we covered what you can do on a daily basis to realize your business vision. Now we'll examine what you can do on a weekly basis to make sure your business vision comes to life.

A typical week for a company executive can vary quite a lot, but there are elements that you can incorporate on a weekly basis to cement your business vision. The following tips are meant to work together with your existing business processes, but you may find that some of them are more easily applied than others. Over time, these actions will result in noticeable impacts and allow you to get closer to reaching your full business potential.

20 Minute All-Hands Meeting

A 20 minute company-wide meeting, held once a week, is a common practice that can help cement your business vision. This kind of meeting gives you a chance to speak to the whole company, connect all the various departments, and keep your employees up to date with what's going on. When your company acts as a cohesive unit, it's easier for your singular vision to permeate the organization.

If some of your employees work remotely, use a video conference call to host the meeting. All the different offices and remote employees can dial into the meeting with a video-capable webphone app. Employees gathered in office meeting rooms can mute the video feed and use a standard conference phone to speak for better sound quality.

Set an Standard Meeting Format

As a best practice, follow a standard meeting agenda to keep the meeting on track. This eliminates confusion, awkward silences, and other distracting elements. If your meetings tend to drag on, set time limits for each topic to prevent excessive and unnecessary speaking.

There are many effective meeting formats you can use. Here are some ideas for how to organize your meetings:

• Have every department give a short update each week, or set a rotating schedule where each department takes one session to give a longer presentation once a month.
• Ask department heads to produce and present the department reports, or mix it up by getting different team members to present each week.
• Pair similar departments together in the meeting schedule (e.g. Marketing with Sales; Engineering with Support).
• Start off the meeting with good news, such as a benefits upgrade or company outing, or save it for the end to finish the meeting on a high note.
• Designate someone to run the meeting if you can't make it. It's counterproductive for company cohesion to cancel the meeting abruptly.

If you're using a rotational method, try to make the order consistent so all the departments know what to expect. Significantly changing the agenda constantly can cause coordination issues and miscommunication. Make sure to share the projects you're working on, too. Your employees want to know that you're in the trenches with them!

Relate Back to the Vision

Putting your business in human terms during the company-wide meeting is crucial for vision leadership. You should discuss critical data at this all-hands meeting. But if your meeting is merely a regurgitation of numbers and graphs, your employees will remain uninspired. A business vision is an evolving dream, not a series of data points.

Nevertheless, the numbers are important. That's why you should make them a part of your dream, and not separate from it. Build a narrative thread that weaves through the data points and merges with your own business vision. For instance:

Wow. We're at 30,232 users as of yesterday. Nice job, guys. Now that we've jumped that hurdle, we can start scaling our app for bigger businesses. Soon all the Fortune 500 companies will know our name.

We made 1,243 deliveries locally last week. Missed our target. The number should be around 1,500. That's the threshold we need for more capital. Let's work on that this week. Before you know it, you'll be telling your grandkids, I worked at that place when they just a bunch of nobodies in a garage.

The first statement deals with good news; the second with bad news. But both speakers frame their different situations in similar ways. Notice that both statements contain hopeful optimism. Both project into the future with a positive lens. One executive suggests the largest businesses in the world will be using his app, the other suggests her company will know success for generations to come.

The person who believes he is more likely to succeed often achieves success. When you're on a conference call with your entire company, you should be the hopeful optimist when you can. This conviction in your vision, in front of all your employees, is very strong and reassuring to the people who work for you.

Streamline Communication and Productivity

Miscommunication between any of your employees, whether it happens between groups or individuals, is detrimental to your vision. The visionary dream inside your head will get polluted by inefficiencies that chips away at the clearness of your vision. Low productivity can also obscure your vision. A lack of productivity means that your dream might never become a material reality.

Productivity and communication are uniquely intertwined with your business vision, and with each other. On a weekly basis, there are several measures you can take to boost communication and productivity amongst your teams.

Foster a Face-to-Face Communication Environment

The first facet of a message is its information content. The second facet of a message is the medium in which the content is transmitted. Every vision is a message. Therefore, we can group your vision into two distinct faculties.

1. The information content of your visionary message. This is the information that you convey to your employees. The information content of the message outlines your vision in the clearest possible way.
2. The medium that transports your message. In the case of an office setting, this is generally face-to-face human speech, along with conference calls, video chats, IM, and email.

Accurate information content and face-to-face communication are the most effective content/medium pairing. Which is why you should foster a face-to-face communication environment when you can. Keep it simple:

• Leave your office door open a few days every week.
• Engage in non-work conversations with your employees.
• Greet everyone you pass during the day with a simple "Good morning" or "Hello".
• Instead of messaging back and forth in a group chat, have the team come into your office to chat.
• Read a work related article or a magazine out in a common area.
• If you have time, take lunch with someone.

The more you interact with people in person, the more fluid your other communications will become. Be an effective communicator, with a mastery of both the message and the medium, and watch your vision spread throughout the company.

Identify and Eliminate Sources of Friction

Friction between teams and people is a source of frustration in any office. Friction can lead to forgotten deadlines, work done twice over, and other forms of miscommunication that can disrupt ongoing progress.

Talk to your team to find out where they are having particular trouble with their projects. Then, try to identify the friction or obstacles and come up with ways to bridge those gaps. On a weekly basis, you can aim to:

• Set up meetings between team members who need to talk. As the overall leader of the organization, you see everything from the top down. Find out where conversations need to happen and get the right people together.
• Create a task force to address an urgent issue. Instead of having all your different teams communicating within their different groups, bring together the key players and form a temporary group outside of the current hierarchy.
• Speak personally with a difficult client or vendor. It may seem counter productive to take a support call, but you can strengthen your vision when you come face to face with someone who's having a problem with your product.
• Sit in on a weekly team meeting to get a better sense of how different departments are doing. Is your vision coming across? If not, talk to the head of the department about where your vision is breaking down.

By enhancing intra-office communication, you're cutting out the friction that can spoil the fine edges of your vision. You're also displaying your superior leadership and management capabilities, which makes you more trustworthy and persuasive in general.

Business Vision: Communication and Cohesion

The key to realizing your vision is working towards it on a regular basis. The ideas above are habits that you can develop on a weekly basis to encourage your team to work together and eliminate small inefficiencies that get in the way of success. Use these tips to foster communication, cohesion, and productivity within your company, which lets your vision prosper inside your mini-tribe.

Our next blog will examine the actions you can take on a quarterly basis - every three months - to ensure your vision comes to life.