Manika Gupta in conversation with Meenal Sawhney
In an interview with Meenal Sawhney, who is a Co-founder, Trainer & Speaker at Tranziam, Image Management and Training Professionals, we discuss the 4 most important aspects of a business that business owners usually overlook. The most important being creating the right culture in the organisation.
She said the first and the foremost thing is the culture of an organization. Besides the products and services what should the organisation be looked at for? Culture is very important as it directly affects performance and how the company is perceived. The employees need to feel safe, supported and valued to do their work.
The second is empowering your people because of a lot of time in smaller businesses a big problem is trust. Do you trust your people enough or are you micro managing them. This a very common occurrence. So if you are micro managing, people are not empowered to take decisions and people will not take ownership of what they are doing. It is very important you bring in that culture.
Her company Tranziam focuses on training for middle management and leadership development for woman. She said, women put a lot of constraints on themselves, part of it due to their families but also their own mindset. And she said, “I like to break those”.
Importance of training
Meenal stresses on the importance of training for all businesses. When a company starts up its first aim is to get customers and start generating revenue. In the bargain a lot of things are overlooked like what is the culture of the company, what are the ethics and what values do does it want to inculcate in its people. What kind of people does it want to hire? It needs to start from there rather than focusing on revenue.
She says that smaller businesses pockets are not deep is understandable so they end up hiring less experienced people. They cut corners by hiring people who are lesser in their experience and in the bargain contributing less. It becomes a vicious cycle, companies hire a person with lesser experience, who tries to learn on the job, this leads to micro managing, and not empowering them, with them not taking the responsibility, and the company ends up hiring again. It is just a cycle that continues.
Training yourself for hiring the right people
She said the second element is to train yourself to hire the right people. Then it is very important to train the employees about the culture of the organization, the path of their job, the tools that they have and their support system to perform their job. If these are taken care of, it will cover a whole of things like interpersonal, behavioral and other things.
This will set you up for success, she said.
