How to Fail as a Business Part 1

January 14, 2008  |  By Justin Nowak  |  Articles   

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This is the start of a series of post’s based on this subject. It came to be out of many conversations with colleagues and businessmen over coffee. I hope you find some inspiration from this!

Not Involving your Employees in you Business

What I talk about in this series are things I have experienced first hand from a company that I used to work for, who will be referred to as Company X from here on. They are the prime example for this set of articles as how not to adjust and do business in the new millennium. They paid for all their vital mistakes and now no longer do business.

There is quite the obvious correlation between ignoring your employees and a slow moving, close to death organization. This is a bi-product of the industrial age, where employees ran there tasks by the orders of a few, competition was scarce so they could get away with being slow to change and react and the consumer had little choice. Well globilization has changed all of this, but the mindframe still exists through a lot of large well established companies and the people that have grown up with these ideals.

But what most businesses are realizing that positive business power comes from communities rather than one mind. By using the ingenuity of many minds to accomplish a task you will more than likely come up with a much better solution than one mind. The dialog that opens up between colleagues can provide different perspectives that open up new doors that may have remained shut without a team working on it.

By not listening and including your employees you run a great risk of missing great opportunities and becoming a stagnant business.

What do I do?

You start by including your employees in all aspects of how you conduct business. When you have meeting with your employees and ask for suggestions, take them to heart. Show your emplyees that then mean something to the organization. That they are valued members of the team. When you decide to implement their suggestion, make sure you are making them part of this. After all it was their idea in the first place.

Have an open door policy where employees can bring suggestions to you at anytime. Discuss the suggestion with them to some detail to show you care about their efforts and so you can completely understand where they are going with the idea. This initial dialog will allow you to assess the viability of the proposition and if you should move forward investigation or pan the idea.

Including your employees builds their loyalty to your organization, and your employees are the biggest asset you have. They can take your business to new heights, but only if you empower them to do so. If you don’t include your employees you face the chance that you can fail as a business over something so small and blatantly obvious.

Start taking the steps to get everyone on your team involved and you will build a healthy stronger team that will be based on trust. Your employees will be more open to organizational change and will more often pay your trust back in kind.

Here’s to building a strong team!

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Justin Nowak
About the author, Justin Nowak
A sales jedi who lives and breathes the process, and longtime member of YGG, Justin has attempted to sell each of you something sub-consciously, you just didn't notice.

4 Comments

  1. Scott M said on January 14, 2008   

    Just be sure that your employees don’t get in over their head. Not everyone has the knowledge or even the desire to be involved in all aspects of the business.

  2. Justin said on January 14, 2008   

    You are right but hardly any businesses give their employees the choice.

    But some people just want to stick to their job and punch the clock.

  3. John Peden said on January 15, 2008   

    I think employees can be coaxed into suggestions and participation, particularly younger members of the team. In my experience, the teams I have been a member of are usually not interested in anything more than punching the clock. This more-often-than-not has stemmed from a feeling of contempt towards a manager, I wonder if an employee who became a member of a startup after a months/years spent becoming an introvert could be brought back?

  4. Joe Hoyt said on January 15, 2008   

    Listening to employees is second in the pecking order behind listening to customers in my book. Actually, I think learning from employees and customers is more important than listening. Learning implies that there will be change in the organization so that the company’s and customer’s needs are better met.

    Jack Welch initiated change at GM by creating crisises within the organization. These crisises empowered employees to look for different ways in which they could help the company grow. If they couldn’t figure it out, they were let go. With GM under Welch (I don’t know much about current management), the focus and responsibility really belonged to the employees.

    Now let me flip the article around a little bit. When you’re running a company and employees believe that they’re not being listened to, what do you do? I really don’t think taking suggestions in a meeting will do anything to change moral or the sentiment within the company about the management team or improve employee performance. You change people and organizations by empowering them to stretch and do something bigger than themselves. A company that really cares about their employees will make it easier for their employees to shine.

    Of course communication fits into this conversation, but communication in and of itself is not enough to make employees feel like they are truely valued, which is what I think people mean when they say company X isn’t listening to them.

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