90-Day Sprint – Implement & Train Employees
Step 7: Implement & Train Employees (Weeks 12-13)
Once you’ve developed your solutions to your crises, you can now implement them in your company. There are companies in various industries that will come into an organization, for hundreds of thousands of dollars, analyze everything (similar to what we’ve working on up to this point), and tell you all of the stuff you need to do. That’s wonderful, except for the fact that most organizations don’t have the resources, talent, or experience at hand to implement these changes.
Implement
Consultants can tell you all day long what you should do for your company, but in the end, it’s you who is the financial leader of the company. It’s you who should implement the changes needed to be made.
There’s a saying “You can lead the horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” You have to take initiative in implementing a change, which requires financial leadership.
Requires Leadership
Most financial leaders are natural salesmen, because they have to sell to other members of the company (operations, marketing, admin) to change their habits and influence different ideas to obtain results.
To lead people, you need to answer the question: “What is in it for them?” or “Why should they follow you?” It is unimportant to sell the benefits of changing the behavior.
Furthermore, leadership is not confined to people reporting to you. It often involves leading peers and sometimes superiors. The goal is to bring the team together for success!
Requires Training People
The last step is actually training people to institutionalize the change. This is where the traditional financial accountant who doesn’t want to work anymore turns into the extroverted leader who encourages his or her colleagues to adapt. You can both provide financial insight, as well as helping the organization evolve.
As an organization grows, it reaches a “tipping point” where individual effort alone cannot achieve results. The financial leader must bring together a team with talent and train them for the skills needed for success!
Resources:
Guiding Principles for Recruiting a Star-Quality Team