As a member of a management team in a small or medium-sized company, you face many challenges and responsibilities. One of the most important factors in ensuring the success of the company is to create an efficient and well-functioning organization that is easy to lead.
But what does it mean to be “easy to lead”?
In this article, we will describe how you as a management team can work to make your company easy to lead, using the seven principles of ISO 9001 as a foundation. We will also provide concrete examples and metaphors from reality of what the opposite means and how it can affect the company.
A company that is easy to lead has a clear and strong customer focus. This means that all decisions, processes and changes are made with the needs and wishes of the customer in mind.
To understand what this means, we can take the example of a restaurant:
If a restaurant does not listen to the wishes and expectations of its guests, they will soon lose customers and gain a bad reputation.
The same applies to your company. Being responsive to customer needs and working to improve your product or service based on their feedback is a crucial factor in becoming easy to lead.
Strong and clear leadership is essential to creating an organization that is easy to lead.
Effective leadership means that you as a management team agree on the company's vision, strategy and goals and communicate this in a clear and consistent way to your employees.
Imagine that your company is an orchestra. If the conductor does not give clear and consistent signals to the musicians, the result will be chaotic and disharmonious.
The same goes for your company — strong and clear leadership makes it easier for your employees to understand and work towards common goals.
A company that is easy to lead invests in engaging and involving its employees in the business.
This means that you as a management team encourage and support the development of your employees and that you create a work environment where everyone feels seen, heard and valued.
An example of the opposite of this could be having a hierarchical and authoritarian organization in which the opinions and ideas of employees are not taken seriously and where they are not given the opportunity to influence and develop. This creates a negative work environment and can lead to decreased motivation, higher staff turnover and thus a company that is difficult to manage.
A company that is easy to lead systematically works to improve and streamline its processes.
This means that you as a management team have a clear understanding of how your processes are connected and that you are continuously working to simplify and improve them.
A metaphor for the opposite might be to imagine a car factory where you have no control over how the cars are made, resulting in long lead times, quality deficiencies and dissatisfied customers.
By working in a process-oriented way, you create an organization that is easy to lead and that delivers high quality to your customers.
Being easy to lead means that you as a management team have a culture of improvement in which you constantly strive to develop and improve.
This means that you encourage your employees to come up with suggestions for improvement and that you take into account criticism and feedback from customers and employees.
An organization that is not engaged in constant improvement can be likened to a garden left to its fate — soon the weeds will take over and the garden will become unmanageable and unattractive.
By working on continuous improvement, your company becomes easier to lead and more attractive to both customers and employees.
A company that is easy to lead makes decisions based on facts and insights rather than gut feeling and assumptions.
This means that you as a management team work to collect data and analyze it to make informed decisions that benefit both the company and your customers.
Imagine the opposite -- making decisions based on what you “believe” is right without having any concrete facts to lean on. This can lead to costly mistakes and inefficient processes that make your business difficult to lead.
Finally, it is about creating and maintaining good relationships with all stakeholders, such as customers, suppliers and employees.
A company that is easy to lead has strong relationship management and sees the value in building long-term and trusting relationships.
The opposite of this can be to have a short-term and opportunistic approach in which quick profits are prioritized over long-term relationships, which in the long run can damage the reputation of the company and make it difficult to lead.
In summary, being “easy to lead” means that you as a management team are actively working to create a strong customer focus, clear leadership, engaged employees, efficient processes, constant improvement, fact-based decisions and good relationship management.
By doing this, you can build a well-functioning and successful organization that is easy to lead and that achieves both short- and long-term goals.
