Successful companies, and successful employees, know what it takes to win. They know how to succeed at work.
Think of work as a game. As a player, you need to know the rules of how to play and how to win. These are set out via clear goals and key objectives from the leadership. You want teammates (employees) and fans (customers) who are energetic and loyal. More importantly, you have to love the game and be focused on playing it to win.
Problems in the workplace begin when people don’t have clear direction from the leadership. They are not placed in roles that are aligned with their strengths or where the outcomes of work feed their souls. Another major deterrent to employee engagement is when the company either lacks values and purpose, or those phrases have just been written down somewhere and are no longer alive in the organisational culture. Leaders at work are like coaches. Their job is to train and inspire everyone to win, to achieve the end game.
Game of soccer
If you really want to find out how focused your employees are, ask them what it takes to win at your company – ask them what it takes to win in their specific job role. Some employees may answer that they don’t know what it takes to win. Others may mention that it requires the right skills, commitment, or teamwork to be successful. These may be good answers, but can the employees articulate the specific actions or performance behaviours necessary to truly achieve customer loyalty or long-term profitability and growth?
What does it take to win in football? You may say “a good team,” “good coaching,” or “good players.” While these answers are correct, the way to win a football game is points — or more precisely, more goals than the opponent. Good plays and good coaching are what teams use to try to win, but running good plays and competent coaching doesn’t necessarily equate to winning. In fact, some very good teams with excellent coaches have run very well-executed plays, yet they still end up losing. Football teams don’t exist to run plays, they exist to score points and win matches.
Football players are “hired” to get results, not just to perform tasks out on the field. Coaches of non-winning football teams may soon find themselves in the middle of a staff shake-up.
Customers’ judge
To know what it takes to win in the business world, companies and employees need to look at their organisation or job from the customers’ perspective. Customers determine whether or not your company and its employees are winning. Customers know the real score.
Customers consciously or unconsciously know exactly what they want. For example, guests of a hotel want their guestroom to be clean, quiet, comfortable, safe, and everything in the room to function properly.
Purchasers of power tools want the products to be safe, durable, reliable, easy to use, and to perform the functions they were designed to perform at the level promised in the advertisements. From a service perspective, most customers hope your staff will be friendly, courteous, professional, knowledgeable, helpful, and responsive to their needs.
To help employees determine why they exist and what it takes to win, I ask them to write a product or service description stating specifically what they are selling. Every position, whether blue-collar or white-collar, is selling a product. The product may be tangible, like a hotel room or a power tool; or it might be intangible, such as the feeling a customer gets when they interact with you.
A product description describes what a customer is really buying, or why a job classification exists from the customer’s perspective. It defines the implied promises the customers expect when they patronise your company.
Valet attendants are “the official greeters” for a hotel and the first and last opportunity to make a good impression on the guests”. A casino host exists to “part people from their money and do it in such a way the guest wants to do it again and again.” To win, good showroom managers know they must have the showroom full of “butts in seats at the highest possible ticket price.”
Likewise, hotel managers need “heads in beds at the highest possible room rate.” The best custodians and porters “make the place sparkle,” not just by keeping the property clean, but also by having an outgoing, friendly, and “sparkling” personality.
Purpose of existence
Unfortunately, even people in the Human Resources department can lose focus as to why they exist and what constitutes “winning” in their position. Human Resources does not exist to hire staff, provide training, administer the compensation and benefit plans, counsel employees, or similar HR tasks. This is what Human Resources does; it is not why they exist.
This is what it takes to win for HR employees. The HR staff will prove their value to the company when they focus everything they do on making sure they score in the things that really matter. A company itself needs to know why it exists. A company exists for two reasons and only two reasons. Companies exist to increase revenue and reduce costs.
Or, stated more specifically, companies exist to ensure they are profitable for their owners. There is no other reason to exist. Smart and successful CEOs know why they exist. “Hit the bottom-line or die” is the mantra of winning business leaders.
