signature-team

How to Inspire Your Team with Your Vision

DSC_5974Founder & CEO of Signature Car Hire shares his thoughts on how to inspire your team.

“As an entrepreneur, you may have a brilliant idea and a promising business, but you’ll ultimately only be as good as your employees allow you to be. If you want them to work hard, come to you with great ideas and live the values of your brand outside the office, then you’ll have to ensure that your staff are fully signed up to your vision.

Think about it this way. Your employees are the people you have hired to ensure your vision can be executed in a successful manner. Execution is the most important part of any business, and one that many companies get wrong. This is often because employees don’t fully understand or engage with the organisational strategy, meaning that strategic goals and work are misaligned – this leads to missed opportunities, poor performance and financial overspend as you try desperately to steer everything back towards the intended course.

To get proper execution, you have to inspire your team by committing yourself entirely to your goals, and by including them in your vision, planning and ethos. It is only through this, and by making your interests their interests, that you’ll empower them to work towards your goals at every moment of the day – whether that’s sending an email, taking a meeting or simply sharing a chat with a colleague.

Over the years I have selected a core team of loyal employees to implement my ideas. The strength of our relationship allows me to outline my ideas to them and know that they will implement it in a way that meets our collective high standards. Creating this team and this ethos took time, but it’s a relatively straightforward process, and one that I’ve outlined in several steps below.

Have Core Values that Apply to All Areas of Your Business
You might have a list of principles in your head, which have enabled to you succeed, but how are your employees supposed to know about these without you telling them?

Write down your business’s vision, mission and values in engaging language and circulate these to your staff. At every opportunity, whether discussing past successes or future plans, refer back to these principles and make it clear how following them helps your business succeed.

Signature’s values, for example, are quality of product, attention to detail and exemplary customer service. Our employees are all keenly aware of these and use them as a reassuring touchstone in their everyday work, which allows them to be confident that, if their work reflects these, they will be doing a great job.

Live the Values: Be Passionate about Your Idea and Inspire Staff
There’s no point in taking the time to do the first step if you don’t live by what you say. You need to live your values, and to sell these to your employees at every step of the way. Employees are often most interested in activities and ideas that will benefit themselves personally, so you need to both show that your principles have made you successful, and offer incentives for those who perform best and help your company meet your goals.

Living the values is particularly important when you’re trying to achieve employee buy-in on new ideas. Be passionate about your ideas, but also seek out any fears that employees may have and address them on the spot – decisiveness is key.

Start Small
Employees gain confidence from experience, so start off with small projects that help them see how easy success can be when they implement a project by your rules. While they are working, demonstrate how their success will help the company, and how small projects will snowball into great things. The more you can inspire them with a rosy vision of the company’s future and their own personal success, the more driven they will be. Once they have learned by experience, they will be enthusiastic to take on bigger challenges and confident enough to tackle any problems as they arise. They will also appreciate that they can come to you for support if necessary.

Reward your Staff for Following your Vision and Values
Whether the wins are big or small, make sure you reward your staff for following your vision and using the values to achieve the company’s goals.

Make sure the rewards are visible, to encourage others to follow suit, and that rewards are something the employees actually want! Whether this is increased responsibility, astaff day trip or perks like iPads or group lunch on the boss, employees will feel incentivised and valued by the opportunities on offer.

Encourage your Staff to Contribute at the Top Level
It  may be your company, but the employees will feel like it’s their company too. As such, to maximise their dedication to your vision, you should make them feel empowered to make suggestions about all aspects of the company. This will not only make them more loyal to the business, but it also creates a brilliant pipeline for new ideas. Your staff know your business better than anyone else, and you may get some fantastic new suggestions for products, services or ways of working that take your company to the next level. All you have to do is listen!”