When you’re starting out on the lifelong business journey, you will feel, more often than not, that you have many plates to spin. Getting into the adequate mindset of logistical planning can be a shock to the system if you’re not prepared. But as a leader, looking after how your logistics slot-in nicely, from one department to another, and between your supply chain and your warehouse, all of these things can feel like smaller cogs of a very large engine, which can be very overwhelming. How can we best maintain these logistics?
Encourage Dialogue Between Employees
You can’t be everywhere at once, but you can influence the culture of a business when you lead by example, and make an active attempt to ensure every department and employee is communicating with an effective and friendly dialogue. Transparency in business is something a lot of companies are seeking out, but it can be very difficult to implement across a large business, or even a small start-up. Instead, work at changing one little thing at a time.
Ensure You Know What You Don’t Know
It might sound like a contradictory term, but if you don’t know something, then you need to find the appropriate resources to fix the gap in your knowledge. Understanding what your strengths are, but also what your weaknesses entail will mean that you are constantly working at improving your business. Luckily, there are numerous consultancy firms that help businesses to find out these aspects, Paul Trudgian being one of many. It’s very difficult, because you are trying to keep track of so many different aspect of the business, so the more mistakes you make, the better you will learn. And while we don’t necessarily like to make mistakes all the time, by understanding what our failures are, we will work better at improving everything.
Communication Is Always The Magic Word
It’s been said countless times before, but communication is vital across every aspect of your business. Not just in the internal processes, but with the customers also. Ultimately, logistics, when done right, will appear seamless, and the customer won’t know any different. But if there’s a problem with the supply chain, then we have to be upfront with our customers and tell them that there is something wrong, so they don’t lose faith in our abilities. It’s not about blaming the supply chain, but it’s about taking responsibility for the mistakes that we make, and being honest with our customers. If they can’t handle it, then yes, we will lose that customer, but at least we have been honest with them.
Logistics in business is about constant improvement, and when you are starting out, you will figure out quickly where your failures lie. But also, the almighty task of maintaining these processes can weigh heavy on us, and this is where we need to develop our own sense of internal strength. But this happens as you go along, and tackle these challenges head on. The bigger picture is something you have to keep firmly in your mind, and it is this that will make for an effective leader in logistics.
