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Continuing our discussion of the authoritative management style with the fourth element:  commitment to vision.

Commitment to vision means that you never let your mind stray from the vision and mission of the company.  When you're running on fumes, trying to get enough work done to make payroll at the end of the week, it can be easy to cut corners or to make snap decisions that serve well in the short-run but don't stand the test of time.  A leader of leaders must have an unwavering eye on the overall goals of the company and assure that all decisions are in alignment with those goals.

Let's say one of your company's goals is to have a safety record that beats your industry's average.  One day as you're walking through your plant, you notice that a guard is missing from a piece of machinery.  You ask the machine operator where the guard is, and he says it was removed to make it easier to fix problems quickly.  In theory, this might sound like a good idea.  After all, fixing problems quickly means less downtime and higher profits, right?  But think for just a minute about what the lack of a guard might mean in terms of safety performance.  Is it really worth someone's fingers being lost to save a few minutes of downtime?  What would you say when you made that phone call to the injured person's spouse? 

Even if you look at it in terms of profit, you have to consider how much you would have to pay in OSHA fines if you were inspected.  That amount is likely to be much more than the amount you pay someone for the time it takes to remove the guard after the machine is tagged out during a breakdown.

As the owner of the company, it's your job to think through some of the quick decisions that people make on the fly to see if they really make sense in terms of the big picture.  It actually ends up being pretty easy if you have a firm commitment to vision.

Communication is closely tied to commitment to vision.  In order to keep all of your leaders going in the same direction, you must clearly communicate the vision to them.  Again, this goes back to the road trip example we talked about when defining management styles.  If you send all of your employees on a trip without clearly communicating where they are supposed to go and when they are supposed to get there, the chances of them all arriving are pretty slim.  We'll talk much more about communication in

future blog posts.

A coaching mindset is important because one of the best ways to develop leaders among your staff is to allow them to make mistakes without fear of reprisal.  You want your staff to experiment with new ways of doing things so you can find the best way.  You want them to innovate and design new processes and products that allow your company to grow.  Where would we be if Edison hadn't experimented to invent the light bulb or if Bill Gates hadn't tried new things to make computers accessible to the masses? 

And there is no doubt in my mind that if you let your employees experiment, there will be things that don't work out as planned.  That's where the coaching mindset comes in.  Rather than writing up an employee whose experiment didn't work, you need to spend that time and energy figuring out why it didn't work and what can be tried the next time to make the process more successful.  If your employees get in trouble for trying out new ideas, they will stop trying, and you will be stuck using the same processes for the entire time you are in business, while your competitors race ahead of you by being innovative. 

When you take a coaching mindset, your employees know they are free to experiment within certain parameters that you can set up to minimize your risks.  You may want to have them try something new using only scrap product, or only on weekends.  You might want to set a dollar limit for what they can spend.  What you don't want to do is punish them for an experiment that doesn't work out.  Even failed experiments can be highly valuable, as they provide you with information you can make use of when you design the next experiment.  In fact, it has been said that the only failure is the failure to learn from mistakes. 

If you beat up employees who make mistakes, you will train them to hide their mistakes.  Hidden mistakes cannot be used to educate the company, and you will be doomed to having several employees make the same mistake.  It's much more valuable to have your employees share their experience and what was learned from it, so that others can go on to make different mistakes rather than re-learning the same lesson.