Does your to-do list get longer as the day goes on? Are you constantly putting out fires instead of focusing on the task at hand? Is your team working tirelessly but the company’s goals remain out of reach? You’re not alone. We hear these kinds of frustrations all the time from agribusiness leaders. To help you set a straight course for success, we’re highlighting four steps to help you turn aimless “busy-ness” into tangible, trackable progress.
Step 1: Clarify your business goals and strategies and tie them to behavior
You might think you’ve already completed this step because you can clearly state goals like “be more profitable” or “serve more customers.” It’s not quite that simple. The challenge — and the real key to success — is tying those objectives to your employees’ behavior.
For example, let’s say you want to increase feed sales. Before telling your team to “Sell, sell, sell,” identify the specific behaviors supporting this goal. Success might mean making more cold calls or cross-selling related products at checkout. Maybe it’s expanding your product line to support the entire life cycle of the animal. These are all behaviors that drive success and put your business objectives within reach.
By the way, as you think about goals, it’s helpful to distinguish between “lagging” and “leading” indicators. Lagging indicators are long-term goals that you can’t measure until a lot of time has passed. When you say you want to increase the number of new customers or make the mill more efficient, you’re talking about lagging goals.
Leading indicators are short-term goals you can track right away — like the number of customer visits each month or prospecting calls per week.
Step 2: Craft an intentional culture
We define culture as the behaviors your company does and doesn’t allow and the values it rewards (and doesn’t reward). Thriving companies make sure their desired behaviors and values are aligned. For example, if your company values safety, you never want employees to put themselves in danger by running after a loose hand-jack. Alignment around this value means everyone on the team — from the CEO to the floor supervisor to the drivers — 100% agrees that equipment can be replaced, but people can’t.
Step 3: Build the structure to support the strategy
Here are the three key areas of your business to assess when you’re thinking about culture.
- Organizational Structure
Question: Who owns the goals leading to success?
Everyone at the company must clearly understand both what the company/team goals are and what their specific responsibilities are in achieving them. Aiming to increase margin? Great. Now, align the whole team around this goal by ensuring everyone knows how, precisely, they’re moving the company forward. - Job descriptions
Questions:
What does success look like for the role?
What are the responsibilities of the role compared to the metrics/goals?
Job descriptions must include:
The responsibilities for the role
What success looks like for this role
How the role relates to the company’s big-picture metrics and goals
Success for an inventory role, for example, means quickly locating a specific product that’s been cataloged and shelved correctly … which in turn supports the bigger company goal of providing great service to customers. - Who decides?
Question: Who has decision-making authority?
Your initial response to this question may be, “The general manager.” Remember, location managers often have important insights about customer (and employee) needs, which could influence hiring decisions.
Step 4: Align the processes, incentives and people practices to the strategy and culture
As you take stock of the state of your business, follow this quick checklist:
Have you ensured the right people can access data and information? A client with soaring overtime spending realized the location-level managers were in the dark about OT data, so they couldn’t curb the costs.
Have you ensured your incentives and rewards encourage desired behavior? Say your core value is doing what’s best for each customer. Instead of rewarding workers for moving high-margin products, tie an incentive plan to long-term customer retention.
Have you ensured your people/HR processes support the team you want (and need)? From drivers to salespeople to supervisors, be specific about the strengths and weaknesses of your current team so you can develop and/or hire people to move your company forward.
