Mulyagusdin

Tim UKM Center USK. Kiri ke kanan yang terlihat: Evayani, (tidak teridentifikasi), Dr. Fakhrurazi, Mahdi, (tidak teridentifikasi), (tidak teridentifikasi).

AIL0

Note: this piece was originally shared as a Sway presentation titled “Entrepreneur and Employee” (see the original at this Sway link), sometime in early 2017. The core idea is simple: the entrepreneur and employee relationship is healthy when built through involvement, rather than one-way orders.

Entrepreneur and Employee: Achieving Success Together

Whatever the size or type of business, a businessman is already very used to searching for and coming up with ideas for running their business. Using all kinds of methods, business owners are always trying to find creative, even innovative, new ideas to solve company problems, and maybe even push revenue to a higher level than their competitors.

That said, obstacles will always show up once a concept or idea has been found and is ready to execute. The most common obstacle is the unpreparedness of employees in applying a new outlook within the company. So it falls to the entrepreneur to make sure that creative idea gets carried out successfully, becoming a genuinely cutting-edge, innovative breakthrough.

Of course, no business owner wants to see their idea fail before it's even tried.

One approach that needs to start being applied is building ideas together. Helping each other and contributing input is one way to spark motivation toward reaching shared goals and achieving company success more broadly. The more input team members give on what's expected of them, the more likely the workforce is to genuinely get involved in better ideas once they're carried out.

Buy-in is a term big-company managers often use. They want to make sure that building ideas for the company's benefit isn't something owned only by a handful of people in top management positions, but also becomes an achievement for everyone who'll be involved. Entrepreneur will see team members actively contributing, giving their full energy, and making sure the idea runs well, even guarding it as if they themselves owned the business.

A few pillars need to be put in place to hold up that structure and make the idea's execution a success.

• The employee needs room to share their thinking in setting work standards and improving performance. This has to start with a solid, well-built foundation of ground rules: Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). What often surprises the business owner, the manager, or the average employer is that the team ends up setting work standards and performance targets higher than expected, simply because they're motivated to hit goals they set for themselves.
• Write down the targets you want to hit, and agree on them together. List out what you want to achieve, talk through how the process will happen, define success indicators, discuss what could derail it, and agree on all of it together. Make copies and hand them out to every worker, even, where possible, to the most important person in their life, so this becomes shared work within the company, with spirits kept up by each worker's spouse, child, parent, close friend, or partner.
• None of this will bear fruit if the plan behind the idea isn't tracked in detail: its progress isn't monitored, its execution and results aren't evaluated, and, even more absurdly, it never gets carried out at all. So, plan the steps, and do it.

Plan by understanding what this idea will run into. Customer segmentation, the production process for the goods or services, and the costs involved all need to be clear. Then match it to the skill held by the employee. Delegate. Assign the team. Then watch how the progress unfolds. Pay attention to strengths and weaknesses. Keep giving feedback and motivation, and remind them to take a moment to relax, coffee time.

Every time the target changes, every time the agreement shifts to adapt to how complicated the work has gotten, sit back down together. Write it out and agree on it again. And remember, the original idea very often changes, and can even end up with a result that's completely different. Once again, take enough time to stay calm but keep thinking, with a cup of coffee for company. And do it again. And again.

Business owners are already very used to counting things. They certainly know how. But only the entrepreneur counts what actually deserves to be counted. Count and award your employees as you do for yourself.

Enjoy your morning coffee. 🙂