As the wheel of management turns, you find out what’s going on in whichever area of your business you happened to have turned your attention to, and then make a decision about where you want your business to go. This is you doing your planning. Planning is very important. To paraphrase Winston Churchill ‘Fail to plan, plan to fail!
So, having planned what you want to happen, you now need to do what you have decided that you, and everyone else, are going to be doing. Again, assuming that you are more than a one—person business, this means communicating your plans to others, telling your team what you want them to do.
Regardless of the size of your business, your plan, which is made up of all those informed decisions you’ve been making (see Chapter 3: Planning Properly), is destined to sit gathering dust on the shelf unless you communicate what is in it to those who are going to deliver on it. In section 2.3 above, we established that management’s primary function is to make decisions. The flip side of that coin is the requirement to tell people about those decisions, so that things get done. You can make decisions all day long, but unless you communicate and get stuff done, your business will never move forward.
So, with plan in hand, what do you do? That’s right, communicate that plan. And how are you going to do that? Well, there are many ways to communicate, so let’s write down a list of questions to help us decide the answer:
- Who are you going to tell about your plan?
- What, exactly, are you going to tell them about your plan?
- Which method of communication are you going to use?
Download a template here
Download your template here
When you have filled in your template, click on the briefcase to store the document and add any notes about it in your notebook.
This list reflects a marketing idea known as ‘Market — Message — Medium’, which we’ll shorten to MMM. Using the SMSW, you can think about MMM like this:
- Decide to whom you want to target your message, then…
- Decide what you want to say to them, and then, finally,
- Decide how best to say it.
Lots of decisions there again, you’ll notice. That’ll be the primary function of management then, won’t it? So, if you decide that the operational part of your plan ought to be communicated to your operations team (probably a good decision, that one), then make sure that they don’t get the sales and marketing strategy instead. Sure, they may have a passing interest in how the business is going to be grown, but it won’t really help them produce your goods and services, will it? Once you know who to inform about which parts of the plan, then decide how best to do that. Will a meeting of the entire team work best? Will giving them all a hardcopy of their parts of the plan be most efficient? Will email do the job? The choice is yours.
Get the ideas out of your head and to the people who can act on them
Just a word of caution: in the modern working environment, simply telling people what you want them to do will reduce your chances of it working out as you expected. If you just tell people what to do all the time, you’ll never be a great manager or business owner. They have to know why. Why have they got to do that thing in that way or those things in that order?
You have to look at this as you selling your plan, your ideas, to the people who are going to deliver on it, and that’s why you must look at the communication of your plans as marketing, and tell them why they should ‘buy it’. We’ll cover this in more detail in Chapter 4: Getting Stuff Done, but now we’ll move on to cover, briefly, what you have to do to make sure that your team are actually doing what you what them to be doing.