Think big, but communicate small. It’s a concept that Dave Lindsey, founder, president and CEO of Defender Security Co. — a security
systems dealer with 2006 revenue of $55 million — says gets lost by some business leaders. While you have to keep your eyes on the
horizon and your mind on the wide-ranging, long-term goals that will define your business, you also have to constantly remember that
your employees aren’t thinking the same way you are, nor should they have to. As the leader, your job is to take the big-picture concepts
and drive them down to those who have a far narrower focus on a particular job or project. And you do that by keeping your messages
simple and boiling them down to a couple of core components to which everyone can relate, and then repeating them again and again.
Smart Business spoke to Lindsey about how to bridge the communication gap between you and your employees.
Make sure that communication happens. The
most important thing I tell all of our leaders is that it’s more important to make
sure you communicate than to worry
about how you communicate. When I’m
talking about ‘how,’ I’m talking mostly
about the emotional tone, not so much
the method of communication.
Anyone who has gotten married and
saw the preacher before they got married, he says the most important part of
a relationship is communication. The
same holds true in a business setting, but
a lot of people fail to communicate
because they’re not sure exactly how to
do it. They let things fester, or they let
moments slip by.
It’s more important, even if you upset
yourself or an employee, that the communication takes place, than to sit in
your office and not let it happen because
you’re worried about how to do it.
Once you get over that, you can get into
an environment where you realize it’s permissible to upset someone and learn from
it, so you can communicate better the
next time than to just avoid it. If you can
do that, the politics remain at a minimum.
Repetition of messages is also important because it keeps priorities straight.
We all have good intentions and goals,
but we can walk out of a room and
urgent matters hit us, and I think repetition helps us continue to focus on what
is important versus what is urgent.
Bring people together. When you bring
teams together, you all realize you have
the same goals and how dependent
everyone is on each other. It removes lots
of simple misunderstandings and allows
you to remove some waste, such as when
one person is filling out a form because
they think someone needs to see it and
the other person never looks at it.
It becomes like you’re actually doing
double work. One hand doesn’t know
what the other is doing. You might be
talking to the customer in two different ways. In our case, one person might be
stressing the ease of use of a product,
and another might be stressing a different feature. So then you have to agree on
the most important feature, and let’s
both stress it.
Remember to prioritize. I make myself
accessible through simple eye contact
and saying ‘hello’ as I’m walking down
the hall, passing by, making myself
approachable. That calm friendliness is
important.
But I still appreciate a chain of command in handling most ideas. It helps it be
better focused and prioritized. I don’t
want to get off on a tangent that is not critical to the current mission of this team.
I maintain that discipline by encouraging people to talk to senior management.
We have different vice presidents, and I
encourage people to take it to that level
versus directly to me. I’ll listen to it, and
I might even comment on it, but as far as
any action, I encourage them to go to
that point.
In the most extreme situations, I might
send an e-mail to one of my direct
reports and recommend that they get
with this person, but I’m not going to
start dictating action.
Stay simple and focused. Keeping the message simple, our ‘big, hairy, audacious
goals’ from (‘Good to Great’ author Jim
Collins) are something we keep in front
of everybody via posters in all of our
locations.
I even go so far as to make our goals an
acronym or a simple sentence, like we
have a goal to do 1,000 units at a $400 cost
structure. So it’s keeping something like
that in front of everybody in a word or
two.
We made T-shirts up for those. We have
posters, as well, and a regular newsletter
that comes out every week that might
give updates on how we’re doing relative
to those goals. So there is the simplicity
and the casual, repeatable places that we
can keep those messages.
If you start simple, hopefully, you end
simple. We build our compensation
plans and reward systems around those
goals, and that keeps people motivated.
We want the compensation and the goals
to be in line.
Communicate in different ways. I think face-to-face communication is very important between peers. What we do is two
days a week, we have people really
agree to be in the office and focus meetings around those two days, Friday and
Tuesday.
I think it’s important on topics where
you want to have a discussion and consider options, especially of a cross-functional
nature. You can get a more rapid feedback
than to do it by e-mail.
You need to have different forms of
communication because we all learn in
different ways. Also, different methods
are more transferable between different
levels. I could send an e-mail to 600 people at once and get a message out, something that would be harder to do in a
face-to-face or a verbal setting.
HOW TO REACH: Defender Security Co., (317) 253-5200 or
www.defendersecurity.com