One of the most important things business owners and CEOs must do to ensure effective collaboration in the organization is to communicate the overall vision to the employees. Department heads should be able to explain to employees the mission and strategies of the company and how their individual roles fit into the big picture. Sustainable success comes from a cohesive organization-wide strategy based on a clear understanding of ‘line of sight’ beyond departments.

In this guide, let us try to understand the notion of Line of Sight management, its significance, and the steps organizations can take to make it a reality.

Understanding Line of Sight Management

In simple terms, line of sight is all about effective internal communication. It is something that requires leaders in an organization to motivate the workforce towards a common goal by explaining to employees, not just the vision but also the contribution from their efforts. While this appears to be simple to understand, it is not so simple to execute.

According to statistics, as much as 75 percent of the employees have a clear understanding of how their work matters to organizational objectives are actively engaged. On the other hand, only one in four employees are engaged at organizations where such an understanding is not present.

These numbers make it clear that a clear line of sight plays a big role in confirming employee value to the organization. When they understand the overall goals, are aware of the strategies used to achieve them, and feel positive about their contributions to making it a reality, businesses have better chances to succeed.

Line of Sight Communication & Employee Engagement

Clear communication of line of sight is one of the most powerful drivers for employee engagement. It is an important concept that relates to the ability of a worker to understand the relationship between elements driving business success and how they relate to their job. When employees come to the workplace with a clear vision of the connection between these components and can relate them to personal motivation, they are likely to be more engaged and find meaning in their work.

Business leaders, with the help of managers and department heads, can communicate the components of the line of sight management. This requires that the leader himself is clear about how different engagement factors can grow strong and should be committed to a communication strategy that consistently reinforces the relationship between those components.

Here are some ways businesses can improve the important components of light of sight management.

Articulating a clear vision

A lot of business leaders neglect the understanding their employees have about the company’s future. Articulating a vision of the business not just involves communicating the sales and profit goals of the coming years. A vision can be called clear only when all the employees understand why the company is active, what value it creates in customers’ lives, the principles guiding the culture and what its success means to employees, customers, and the world. All other engagement elements become significant only when the company vision is clear.

Defining the business model

An organization’s business model represents how it makes, grows, and sustains revenue. Business leaders should focus on identifying the leverage points in the revenue cycles of the business model. This involves defining the performance areas important for growth potential and the roles and results that need to be fulfilled to achieve success.

Business leaders should then also communicate the roles and expectations to responsible employees so that they can relate their efforts to the achievement. This can happen only when a connection between the company’s overall vision and the business model is well reinforced. When employees cannot explain what their company’s business model is, it symbolizes the failure of the leadership. A clear communication strategy is key to explaining to employees the revenue model and how they can impact it.

Defining the business strategy

While the business model relates to how businesses drive revenue, the business strategy describes how it competes in the market with the model. The success of a business strategy depends on a performance-based culture defined by the leader. It is this culture that determines whether the business gets a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

When the top executives in an organization successfully build and sustain a culture of performance that not only wins but also attracts the best talent, they can anticipate success. The factors driving success get deeply embedded in the workplace culture. The role of the CEO is to ensure everybody is clear about the business strategy to make such sustainable winnings possible.

Recruiting to a role

Current workforce statistics indicate that the world is facing a scarcity of skilled talent. The type of talent organizations need includes people who can join the business as catalysts – impacting the growth trajectory positively. Companies require individuals who don’t come to fill positions but aim to fulfill roles that create something meaningful.

These people have unique abilities willing to spend their time on issues that impact the business strategy. As such individuals are not easily available, companies are facing tough competition. Business leaders must define such roles in the organization and communicate the connection to the business model, vision, and strategy. Everybody in the company should know what his/her role is and what success means for the specific role.

Read about and download internal comms plan template.

Line of Sight Performance Management

Managing the performance of Line of Sight is a powerful approach to business improvement. LOS enables businesses to bring the right changes into effect at the right time in the right manner to ensure sustainable business performance. In other words, Line of Sight performance management builds clear, visible links between company goals and objectives, the metrics and steps that guide towards the goals, and the initiatives taking place at the workplace.

Most importantly, Line of Sight performance management provides the leaders powerful navigational tools to retain focus throughout the process of achieving organizational goals. The performance improvement delivers a comprehensive assistance system aimed to help you achieve the desired business outcomes.

Some of the most crucial elements of the Light of Sight performance management include:

• Defining and clarifying objectives and priorities of the business or department
• Alignment of the organization around measurable objectives and goals
• Identifying and measuring metrics that best suit these results
• Identifying the best tools to monitor compliance with objectives
• Improving the awareness and skills to identify gaps and trends
• Building the skills and systems to deploy course corrections
• Creating a feedback system that gives real-time information on course corrections across verticals in the Line of Sight implementation

Final Words

If you lead a business and prioritize employee engagement, line of sight management is one of the areas you should work on. You can start by communicating the organization’s vision, mission, strategy, goals, and business model to the employees and taking steps to ensure your teams know how their roles and efforts contribute to the achievement of goals. Consistency is the key to fostering a performance culture that will slowly drive the growth and success you aspire.

Read more: Fombrun model of HRM