Articulate the Vision

Getting your employees to buy in to your vision is critical to long-term success and requires consistent attention. My vision for VanDyke is to build an organization that can sustain itself over time, one that outlasts the founder and the employees we have today. As part of realizing this vision, I continue to emphasize our core values and how they can be used to build an organization that can stand the test of time. I work to consistently articulate the values, which include everything from building quality software to making sure this is a great place to work. I think in general those are values that almost anyone in this industry buys in to, so I don't think this is a hard sell. The challenge is to make sure that as things progress, as we add new people, as projects succeed, as projects fail, we reflect on those values, and we keep talking about the vision and the values. It is easy to say we want to make this a great place to work, but on occasion we put in policies or procedures or have projects that take away from that. Someone has to say, "Wait a minute, that isn't the way we do things here. We need to change that. This isn't consistent with our values." And, especially for new people, this can come as something of a surprise, because they might not understand the vision or the values as well as we thought they did. There is definitely some repetition to it. For me, I have managers buying in, but I need them to consistently articulate the values with their staff. We do it as a group in company meetings, but it needs to be done on a daily basis as we interact with our staff.

One of the key core values in building an organization is that we focus on long-term return on investment. Getting employees to think long-term is important. It can manifest itself in many ways. We spend money on books, training, software, and good tools our employees need. The first year I realized I was willing to spend $2,000 on a new monitor, but I was hesitant to spend $700 for a new desk. The reality was that the desk would last longer, and I needed a good desk to hold that heavy monitor. Today the monitor is dead, and we're still using the desk. Make sure employees understand what it means to think long-term; most employees haven't seen it. They are often used to working for companies that are focused on the current quarter. But once they get it, thinking long-term can be a powerful component of empowering your management and your staff.

Another key element of realizing our vision is empowerment. We have recently adopted the unit president concept, which I learned about through the American Management Association's Course for Presidents. The unit president concept is an effective way of defining a manager's or an employee's "sandbox" - the scope of their work The boundaries of the sandbox are defined by their job description, performance standards, a budget, procedures and policies, and legal and ethical guidelines. This concept introduces the idea that where there are shortcomings, coaching is needed. Where there is a desire to expand the sandbox, mentoring should take place. The unit president concept has been an excellent vehicle for discussing where an individual's boundaries are - i.e., where their empowerment starts and stops. In addition it allows us to be flexible and work at moving those boundaries when employees want to expand their areas of responsibilities.