Success is coming if employees are engaged, aligned, and motivated to win.

Posted on by Ercole Davide Rovida

Some days ago I was reading an article from a well known management magazine and I stopped thinking about a sentence I think is the essence of success in business: if you want to be really successful you must have employees engaged, aligned, and motivated to win. That’s the real truth!
I agree 100%.

During my experience in company restructuring, dealing with projec20130618-235240.jpgts less or more complicated, if you can’t count on employees who can feel part of the process, constantly up to date with your guidelines and motivated to reach your goals in a win-win approach, for sure you’ll not be able to be successful and you’ll absolutely feel to be a looser.

That’ sad but, believe me, if you are experiencing like me a deep process of company reshaping with a strong change management environment and you see employees not to be in such a mood, you should completely agree with me.

A leader must check everyday if his first line management and relative staff are following him straight to his objectives with dedication, proactivity, focus and motivation.
If this doesn’t occur he must setup meetings where he must spend some time to review the situation with his organisation, try to understand problems and, above all, involve people to make them be part of the game.

If necessary he should meet people separately but always with the aim to make them feel important and establish the most clear and open dialog.
Even the “less considered” employee can give important contributions.

Today business is becoming more and more complex and to be successful against competitors, gaining market share where many companies once very powerful, more powerful than your company, have lost, is really difficult.

With the right team of people, technically prepared and motivated to win, for sure will not be easy but the probability to reach successfully the goal will tremendously increase.
What I’m realising today is a tremendous lack of people able to stay with you and fight into the market. The actual downturn environment, constantly affecting behaviours doesn’t help.

I meet many people coming from different companies and the attitude is alway the same: depression, negative thinking, absolutely not motivated and more.
And I’m not talking about low level and not skilled people, not at all!
This is a huge problem in many organisations, sometimes not easy to solve and strictly depending on the management that quite often and unfortunately is affected as well.

I’m more and more convinced that this is an issue we are going to leave with for a long time. The remedy is obvious, managers must be able to make a deep change in their attitude, promoting all those actions made to improve or promote engagement, alignment and motivation.

And this must be done even if the same managers must put their trouble behind and hide worries. Without the right team, you’ll go not so far away.

Dear readers,
Hope this short talk will be of interest. My advice is to do all the best you can to make your people delighted to work with you.

You’ll be a winner, your team will be a winning one and your customers unbelievably happy.

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Doing busines fighting against uncertainty

Posted on by Ercole Davide Rovida

Just back from my last business trip, I take a moment to meditate a bit on what is going to happen in next months. Which customers will continue cooperation with my company and which of them will unfortunately finish it.

uncertaintyWe are still experiencing tough times. Economic downturn is still “alive and kicking” and an element still affecting the day by day activities is uncertainty.

After founding two companies since 2009 I can say that the most unpleasant element which is always present everywhere is what I just mentioned. While we are fighting to maintain customers and do our best to expand their business, many times is hard to take strategic and managerial decisions because we are not able to retrieve all the elements we need.

First of all, and this is the most important one, because affects our balance-sheet is payments. Today many companies are working in a so called “limit situation” that means, you are the last of a chain of payments.

If your customer doesn’t receive money you are not paid or you are paid with delay. Another reason could be represented by the fact that you are considered as low priority because you are a consultant. Customers prefer to pay their employees first and then you. Again we are talking about delays. In this case I recommend avoiding dealing with customers paying you with too much delay. It’s better to look for new customers paying you less but regularly.

Anyway there are many other elements that influence this status of uncertainty like unclear sales strategy, management not properly willing to take decisions which may be very important for the future development of the company, products roadmaps not really established and respected, bad product performance and so on.

Having to deal everyday with this kind of “not so motivating” environment is quite expensive in terms of efforts and of course proper motivation. The unique way to fight against this is work at the highest level of quality and deliver a best in class service even when is not easy at all. This is the differentiator you must always show to everybody.

Today you are obliged mainly to live our business in this way and, above all, if you want that your company survive for the followings years, you are obliged to increase as much as possible your customer portfolio using a tactic I use to call “tireless”.

For doing this work up to 16 hours per day, trying to maximize my presence in social networks, maintaining up to date my company’s documentation for marketing and going to selected events where you can meet potential customers.

In this way, even I know is really hard, I can assure you that my business is going quite well and customer base is increasing, permitting me to be quite satisfied and happy to look at the future with a positive feeling.

You can ask why we should do this. The reason is quite simple. Customers acting in the way I described before are often unable to face the market in the proper way and sooner or later they will face serious problems. I experienced many cases where companies even closed forever. If you work with such kind of customers is quite sure that unfortunately you are going to lose them.

The market today is requesting high performance (see my previous post), good corporate image, best in class products and services. Competitors are so strong that you can win them only demonstrating that you are really better than them and, as you can see, is not always so easy.