As research finds that employees who feel heard in the workplace are 4.6 times more likely to deliver high-quality work, getting your business on the same page as your team can often make the difference between record growth and ruinous loss.
Veteran CEO Jack Truong — esteemed for spearheading three major corporate turnarounds — is cognizant of the importance of communication and consensus in the workplace, leveraging these valuable tools to drive rapid growth and create a corporate culture around his transformational business strategies.
“Having led several businesses in publicly traded companies over the past 20 years, I’ve seen and experienced firsthand the long-term impact of corporate culture on company performance,” Truong wrote in the insights section of his website.
“Siloed workplaces may be the biggest detriment to building a culture of success. They are inefficient, deter collaboration, and prevent the company from understanding and then responding quickly to market changes and shifts in demand.”
Understanding the Intricacies To Ensure Consensus
With a leadership career spanning over 30 years, Truong has too often seen C-suites step into their roles with a minimal understanding of the intricate inner workings driving their company’s success.
Oftentimes, getting everyone on the same page starts with the CEO. Jack Truong believes CEOs are prone to failure if they don’t consider things like employees, customers, branding, and production in decision-making and strategy building. Calling it the 80/20 rule, he cautions about the importance of embracing the 20% of a business’s functions that drive 80% of its overall impacts.
“What I’ve seen a lot of times is that people just don’t understand what drives their business or their company, because they don’t have a good handle on the 80/20,” he reflected.
Truong believes, “Once you know what those are, the 20% of the critical aspects that make the biggest impact on how you want to take the company to the next level, then you have to make sure that as a CEO, you have to take total control and make sure that the functions, the different pieces within the company are connected in those few critical priorities.”
By approaching leadership with an all-encompassing view of an enterprise’s opportunities and capabilities, executives can take the reins of decision-making while developing a strategy that embraces all levels of an organization.
Truong considers this the “foreman and Norman” approach to strategy building, which ensures a grounded yet open dialogue throughout decision-making where everyone has an equal opportunity to voice their opinions before the leaders step in with an informed ultimatum.
“You want to create the environment at the beginning where all people voice their opinions and voice their questions, concerns, and then so that you get everything out,” he explains. “But then after that period, then the leader, the CEO, has to make the decision. You’ve got to allow people to have the opportunity to voice their concern, their opinion. But then at the end of that period, the CEO has to make the final decision.”
When shifting business priorities or enacting transformational strategies, getting everyone on the same page in this manner is particularly important to ensuring corporate cohesion and rooting out any potential missteps before their negative impacts manifest.
Truong told CEO Magazine, “It may be that the leaders of the company should be more in touch with what’s happening on the ground, in the marketplace and our production line, so that we can take care of little problems early, rather than have the problems persist and grow into big problems.”
Jack Truong: Cementing Sustained Success With Communication
Upon garnering consensus, Truong believes it can only be sustained through continued communication and measurable results, as a workforce without proper reinforcement is prone to misalignment, often leading to minimal impacts and employee dissatisfaction around inadequately transformative policies.
“As a CEO, you have got to make sure that you directly communicate with the leaders of each one of these critical functions and ensure they come together in saying: This is our strategy, and this is how we are connected and how we are going to execute it together. Because what I see, a majority of the time, people would come out with this grandiose strategy, but nothing happened because they just failed to connect those pieces together.”
Jack Truong put this particular approach to the test in 2011, when he became CEO of the home appliance manufacturer Electrolux and sought to reframe its corporate consensus during a period of downturns. “The company saw North America as a mature market and didn’t expect any growth. In fact, when I took over, the company wasn’t growing and profit was declining,” he said to CEO Magazine.
By identifying the company’s existing capabilities along with the unmet opportunities within the home appliance industry, Truong quickly developed a transformative strategy for Electrolux and sat down with its global leaders to say that despite recent downturns, he believed that there’s no such thing as a mature market; there are only mature business managers, something made all the more clear with relative newcomers to the industry, Samsung and LG, cementing themselves as Electrolux’s chief competitors.
Recognizing that these newcomers thrived on innovation and the increasing intelligence of the technological landscape, Truong decided to take a more scaled-back approach, leveraging Electrolux’s classical appeal to tap into a market that was looking for simple to use products with a timeless aesthetic. “We put more focus on the design to make our products eye-catching, beautiful, and easy to use,” he explained.
With continued reinforcement and a clear corporate vision, under Truong’s leadership, Electrolux’s market value more than doubled and is now consistently ranked among the top two largest home appliance manufacturers in the world, with products like Frigidaire renowned for their sleek and retro style.
While Jack Truong posits that business transformations like this are rarely met without resistance, by embodying the change you wish to see and embracing your decisions regardless of the potential risks, CEOs can foster a profound trust in their leadership, ultimately getting everyone on the same page to lead their business to new heights.
“Throughout my career, I also have been the face of change at companies. It has not always been easy, but I suspect I have a slightly different perspective that enabled my success,” he summed it up.
“Above all, it’s crucial to lead by example and empower employees to take ownership, as well as accountability. This will foster a positive company culture. It’s also equally important that leaders make the tough decisions at the right time to ensure the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. When employees buy into the vision, align with corporate values, and understand the end goal, the future possibilities are endless.”