Introduction
With the growing competition and encouraging socio-economic environment of start-ups and new budding businesses, amazing talents have plunged into experimenting with their skills and innovative ideas into new businesses. We see people with no age bar getting into entrepreneurship. With most of the banking support by the government via subsidiary schemes, business loans and other possible avenues, individuals have begun their journeys successfully!
Let’s take a look at what skills one should begin with as an Entrepreneur!
Defining Mission, Vision, Values
The first and foremost is defining the Mission, Vision and most important the Values of the business or the organization. Having clear statements, helps the customers to set expectations and ask for what the organization plans to serve. The organization must know the strengths and have the strategic services or products to be catered, which define and explain the mission of the organization. Star Bucks, Toyota, TATA and all of these organizations have clear mission statements, they serve the same of what they speak. The Mission hence becomes not only important but also crucial as the customers and staff know the direction of efforts to be put in.
Secondly, the Vision adds onto the Mission. Most of the time, we see small tag lines under the brand’s name. These tag lines are not meant for marketing only, but they also state the vision of how the brand wants to make a difference. The Vision is the long term objective of the organization that talks of the purpose and aspirations, while the Mission is the ultimate goal. The mission and vision together create a targeted strategy for the organization’s development. It also helps to keep the strategies of the managers and innovators to serve the vision and mission together as a strategy which brings them to a collective funnel of work outcomes.
And lastly, the manner in which one wishes to achieve the goal are the Values that the organization holds onto. The values define how the organization is going to operate. If you search about the top ten organizations of the world, a list pops up with popular names. Seeing their “About Us” section on the website, we will have interesting insights. Taking the United Nations Organization, they have an interesting section of “Our Work” that mentions the UN Work Plan, UN Secretariat and UN System. They have defined each of them in a crisp and clear way. While, as we read their “About Us” page, we see the first line, “One place where the world's nations can gather together, discuss common problems and find shared solutions.” They have a larger concept than simply defining themselves into Mission, Vision and Values as they serve the world more than any of us can imagine. Let's take the World Bank. Their mission statements are: a) To end extreme poverty: By reducing the share of the global population that lives in extreme poverty to 3 percent. b) To promote shared prosperity: By increasing the incomes of the poorest 40 percent of people in every country. Their core values are, Impact, Integrity, Respect, Teamwork, Innovation.
Communicating your Values Have you thought about how we can communicate the values with our consumers? Are the tag lines under the brand merchandising or website’s published pages enough? Certainly not. Communication of the values is a very important task that needs to be done with utmost responsibility, dedicated practices of such kind foster a spirit of continuous innovation and improvement for the managers and stakeholders. It is rightly said that “actions speak louder than words.” The totality of decision making, behavioral patterns and thought processes of the President/ CEO or Director have to match up to what the organization has defined in words. That is how the entire task force communicates by their actions and how they relate with their consumers day in and day out. Assisting the consumer with a difficulty, giving appropriate responses for the services, assisting when undergoing a process with the organization, assisting to clear glitches or errors during the services, communicating with the consumers over telephone, email or messages in order to deliver the best of what you can - all of these are the ways one can communicate the values.
Championing the Values The vision of the organization must be the only objective in one’s mind while engaging in any work or activity. That is the key to championing the vision. You can observe someone into a number of different CEOs, for instance TCS, Google, Infosys, Nestle and Parle, Bajaj, Hero Motors and a lot more to count. Motivating Many surveys these days talk of the lack of motivation, or even posts and memes by social media users talk about the lack of motivation at work. Motivation is not a candy of incentives or perks that professionals work for. Leaders who follow the scientific management methods lack their expressions of humanity and miss connecting with their team members on a social level. This causes mistrust, grudges and a mindset of working for monetary and materialistic rewards only for professionals over the time. We highly lack being considerate towards people, however the degree of consideration would vary situationally. Motivation is no longer a cookie of encouragement, it has evolved into a complex expression of transactional behavior among two people or units, where leadership doesn't come by designation but by manner of relating to the team.
Strategy of Formulation The term strategy itself means a combination of complex steps, yet it is a blueprint of what you aim to achieve.
One needs to prioritize what should be accomplished first that could lead to the next. Simultaneously, identifying and utilizing the appropriate resources is very important.
While planning all of this, one needs to identify the actionable process and stages of each development that the organization would need.
Finally, one needs to verify and validate the entire plan either with the advisors or stakeholders or investors or partners or board members before going ahead.
Never forget, there is no harm in learning new from our subordinates or advisors or peers, you may never know someone is capable of predicting and analyzing things due to one’s experience or insider insights.
No business can succeed without a good plan, the plans might fail but that is not the end, it is a learning and investment into learning. It will surely teach you better ways of handling similar situations in the future.
Strategy Execution
Once the strategies are ready, one needs to be firmly committed to them. While abiding by the plans, one may come across situations where some changes or amendments could be inevitable. That does not mean, you must stick to the strategy in such cases. One may have to change the course of action in order to prevent severe repercussions.
While doing so, align a specific resource to the job. Most of the time we see organizations hire traditionalists for positions that are too typical yet ineffective for the outcome of the strategy. These traditionalists could be rich in experience or academics but not fit for the evolution or nuances that are expected for the task. This may call for crafting a specific job role for the job-fit individual, however finding is one is always going to be a challenge.
Amidst the whole process, one will continuously face challenges of reframing and adding small yet important steps to the strategies on minute levels each time and keep the team motivated while going ahead. Hence, empowering the team with information, updates and motivation would be a daily mandate at work.
Conclusion
Monitoring how the team is performing and capacitating team members continuously will be an exhaustive regime to be followed. With the growing tech-ness in the business and people around us, one should capacitate the business and the team to evolve with the technology and control the waves caused due to these transitions. Hence, execution won’t be a single shot step, it is an on-going process that will keep the business illuminated bright and soaring high!
Hope you found this article helpful. If you or your organization is interested to learn more about such attributes and behavioral skills at the workplace, feel free to get in touch with us at RGB Training Services!