A business owner is the brains of the business but employees are the heart of the business. We know what happens to the body when the heart is not working properly. Everything slows down, it becomes difficult to get anything done and can often be terminal. The same happens in most businesses that fail. The owner does not look after the heart of the business and slowly but surely the business slows down and eventually dies. So look after the heart of your business and ensure the most important asset in your business is healthy and able. Every employee on your team has influence over some or all of your customer relationships. One disenchanted employee will hamper your ability to serve customers well, but lots of unhappy teammates will make it impossible for you to succeed. Whatever amount of time and energy you give to sales, marketing and customer service, invest even more in keeping your team equipped, informed and ready to make customers happy! Your employees are the only real connection between a CEO and their leadership team at the top of an organization, and the customers in the real world. If that connection is weak because the top managers don’t trust their employees enough to listen to them, the leadership team will lose touch with its customers and competitors will swoop in to take advantage of the situation. Listen to your employees! Your employees have powerful energy to bring to your organization, if you trust them enough to tap that fuel source. If you write job descriptions and believe that your employees are merely responsible for fulfilling the tasks listed on their job descriptions, you are shooting too low and wasting time and money. If you empower your employees to use their excellent brains and hearts on the job, you will see them create breakthrough solutions, collaborate and innovate far beyond what you could have imagined. You will have created tremendous value for your company out of thin air - just by trusting yourself enough to trust the people you hire! (On condition you have hired the correct people and trained them properly.) Every good thing that you hope to accomplish in your company will be powered by the same energy source - the commitment and talent of your employees. You cannot get at that energy source if your employees are frustrated. When your culture is in danger, you have no higher priority than to open up communication and put things right. Managers pretend that customers are gold while employees are disposable and replaceable cogs in the machinery. How wrong they are! When you are in sync with your employees, your organization will become healthy. It will be more responsive to changes in the market. The work will be easier, more satisfying and more expansive. You won’t run into employee relations issues. Fear is expensive, and fear-based management left over from the Iron Age has no place in the new-millennium workplace. Try trust instead! When you adopt trust as a leadership philosophy, you will see what a powerful fuel source it is. Jack Welch said- “There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow.” The writer is a Kigali Based business consultant and strategist. www.gmskigali.com E-mail: john@gmskigali.com
