One of your jobs as a manager is to be the liaison between senior management and your own employees. This works in both directions, but this article deals with helping your own people see "the big picture" from the organizational point of view.

Imagine you are the sales manager for a leisure travel company, and you've just attended a two-day strategy meeting with your management colleagues across the company. Senior executives have shared their vision for the company's future, and with that as a starting point you and your peers have outlined a companywide five-year strategy. With the help of a professional facilitator, you and each of the other managers have set targets for the upcoming year and implementation plans to achieve them.

Congratulations! So far, so good.

Now you're back at your office, and your task is to meet those targets through he efforts and work of your people. And this is where many managers make a big mistake: they don't help their people see the "big picture" from the company's viewpoint.

Robert Cialdini, in his groundbreaking book, "The Psychology of Persuasion", points out that people are more likely to do what you want them to do if they understand why they are doing it. Here's what can happen if you don't help them understand.

Let's suppose, for example, that your company has owned 30% of a small subsidiary that runs golf package vacations, but this has never been a big priority and has received little attention from the sales force. Now, however, the company has taken over 85% of the subsidiary and plans to grow its share of this market.

You dutifully go back to your sales force, point out the low sales of golf packages and tell them they need to sell more. A month goes by with no improvement. At the next sales meeting, you read the riot act. Your people are surprised at what they see as your over-rection. After all, golf packages have never been a big deal, have they? What's the problem?

The problem is that you didn't set the context for your new expectations of them. If you had told them about the increased ownership in the subsidiary and its planned importance in the scheme of things, and then worked with them to set new sales targets and prospecting plans, the results would probably have been quite different.

Although my example uses a sales setting, the same principle applies no matter what discipline, function or department you manage. People in Accounting, Human Resources, Manufacturing, IT or any other area need to understand what they are working towards in order to perform well.

One of the jobs of managers is to set context for their people. That means helping them see how their work fits into the overall needs of the company. You can meet their natural human need to feel valued by showing them how important their contribution is to the company's success. Keep them informed about the "big picture" and watch them live up to their potential.
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