Speaker 1: In this video, we're going to focus on how you as a manager can contribute to your organization's vision and mission by aligning yourself and your team members to the broader vision statement of your organization. To understand this, I need to draw your attention back to the first chapter of this entire training session wherein we spoke about what is management, what is leadership, what's the difference between that, and what's the core duty of managers. I would just like to remind all of you that what we discussed that time, that the fundamentals of management is originating from a corporate policy, and then it depends on the managers on how you organize, plan, control, and direct your resources to meet whatever is defined in the corporate policy. That's basically the mission of all the managers. However, we also need to understand from where the corporate policy is originating or why the corporate policy came into existence. And if we just go back, we would realize that we also spoke about it's the vision that the organization has due to which, and as per that vision, a corporate policy gets drafted. And typically, it's the founder of the company or the CEO of the company who coins the vision statement of the company. Now, your job as a manager is basically to translate the company's vision to make it very relevant and meaningful to your team. That's basically the challenge that you will have as a manager. And we will try to understand what I basically mean by this through some examples. So let's just go through some examples. I'm pretty much sure post that it would be crystal clear for you what I mean by that. Let's say we have a company which has set a monthly target of $100 million sales for a particular month. So we're just talking about a marketing or a sales industry in this particular example. And what your company does post that is once they set the target, they inform their executive leadership, middle management, first line management team, maybe through a newsletter or through communication or by inviting all of them in a meeting, they just decide to communicate to everyone. They seek all of your help to achieve this particular target. So this basically gets pushed down through the corporate ladder and gets communicated to everybody. And then finally, it reaches you as a manager. And what you do is you hold a meeting with your team member and you decide to inform your team that, guys, we need to help our company achieve $100 million target for this month. The problem with this kind of approach is we are not making this relevant to your team members. And most of your team member after listening to you would be very confused because although they would understand that, okay, your company has set a target or set a sales target of $100 million, but how can a small team like us help our company make $100 million sales? It's a huge task for us. So your team member would be very confused and perplexed after listening to you. So they will not be able to understand what's expected out of them to achieve this huge target. And of course, if your ground level employees or people reporting to you are confused about what they need to do to help you and then what you need to do to help the company, then of course they will fail in their job. And if they fail in their job, your company will miss its target. Let's see another example of another company which has set its eyes on the same target and let's see how they decide to communicate to their employees. So let's say we talk about another company and the company has a $100 million target of sales for this particular month. But instead of communicating to everyone about this particular target, the CEO decides to hold meeting with the leaders who are reporting to him, right? So close group of people. And what he does is he breaks that $100 million target into let's say three office leaders. I'm just giving an example, there can be five, six, 10 leaders, but I'm just giving an example here. So let's say he decides to break it up into three departments or three leaders and the CEO decides, okay, you need to achieve $20 million, B needs to achieve $40 million and C needs to achieve another $40 million. He gives individual target to individual departmental leaders and then he expects the same to be done going forward. So those leaders again conduct similar kind of meeting with their reportees and they kind of communicate the target further breaking it down. So the breakdown of this target continues through the corporate ladder. And then similarly, like in the previous organization, it will finally reach you who are in the first line manager. And then you have a dollar value target to achieve for your team, which would be very, very small. And not only this will give you a meaning that, okay, this is achievable, this is feasible, and this will give you confidence that, okay, you understand what's required from you and your team. And then when you go back to your team, you need to further break down that statement into, guys, we need to sell X number of items this month, right? Instead of communicating the dollar value target to the team, which some of your team might not care about, some fictitious financial dollar value target, you need to communicate that, okay, what are the things that my team members are doing right now? What's their core job? I need to break this mission statement into more relevant and meaningful statement, which they can execute, right? So if I tell my team that, guys, we need to achieve $1,000 of sales this month, they might be thinking how to achieve that. But the moment you say, we need to achieve 200 sales this month, and then you track those number of sales every day or every week, it will be much more easier for the team members to also align with the target that you have set. And they would be, if you can nurture your team culture and develop a healthy competition, then, of course, your team members will rally behind you to achieve this particular target. And once you achieve this target, you automatically meet your dollar value. And if managers, all managers like you achieve your individual dollar value, then the company as a whole will achieve its $100 million target. So this is basically what I mean by breaking down your mission or vision statement of your company or the target, anything that the CEO or the higher leadership team has set, how you break it down and make it more relevant to your team members so that they understand what's expected from them. And once they understand, they start working at it. This is again a marketing and sales examples that I gave you. And this was a pretty easy to understand because we're talking about numbers and breaking down of the numbers. But let's also talk about one more example where we are not talking about numbers, but we are just talking about a vision statement of an organization, and how you as a manager can translate that vision statement, break it down into simple, meaningful, actionable things for your team. For this example, I decided to pick Amazon because all of you would be knowing Amazon, right? So imagine that you lead or manage a logistic team at Amazon, and Amazon's vision statement is to be the Earth's most customer-centric company, a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy, right? Now, this vision statement is very clear to the employees, this vision statement is very clear to the customer. But then if you are managing a logistic team, you might want to cascade that same vision down your unit by imagining how accuracy of fulfillment and speed of product delivery makes good on customers' desire about finding anything they wanted to buy, right? So basically, you're breaking it down and emphasizing the job that your team is doing, you're emphasizing on the quality of the job that they're doing, and helping them understand that if we keep on doing this thing properly, then it will eventually make our company's vision statement come true. So I hope I was able to kind of penetrate your minds and make you guys understand what I mean by aligning yourself to the vision of your company, right? And I need you guys to practice this because this will only come with practice. If you're working for any organization, try to understand or try to learn what is the vision statement of the company is, right? And then try to break that vision statement down to a more meaningful and relevant item for your team for their consumption. Try it out, you might fail a few times, but do not give up, right? So try to break it down in a simple statement, see how the team behaves, see how the team members are responding to it, whether the team has confusion understanding the sub vision statement that you have coined for them, right? And if you see they are still confused, then that basically would mean that whatever vision statement you have coined for them, they are still not getting it. So you might have to rework on it, right? So you have to keep doing it till you find a synchronization happening with your company's larger vision statement and what employees are doing. So all the best to you. I'll see you in the next video. Till that time, take care.