Antonio Swad doesn’t have his own office. He doesn’t even have his own desk.
The founder and CEO of Pizza Patrón Inc., a pizzeria franchisor that specializes in serving Latino communities, owns a small folding table. When he needs to meet with someone, he sets the table up in someone else’s office.
The reason? As the leader of a growing company, which generated $38 million in 2009 revenue, Swad doesn’t want to find himself stuck behind a desk, getting information about his company and employees secondhand. He wants to be an active, engaged leader, projecting a positive example throughout his business.
“My day consists of going around and visiting people at their workspace and looking at what they’re looking at,” he says. “I do a series of visits throughout the day, and you’d be surprised how much you learn. You pretty much know where everyone is at and what they’re working on.”
Smart Business spoke with Swad about how you can become an active leader by leaving your desk behind as often as possible.
Leave the office. Burn your desk and don’t sit down. You want to have an organization with energy. You have to have energy. You’d be surprised that people take cues from the person that is in charge. They take cues that are not only spoken word; they take body language cues. They take tonality cues on how you say something. We talk all the time in my company, we have these little metaphors for what we really mean. We’ve made our own sort of language. For example, I’ll come up to somebody and say, ‘Tell me what is on your stove.’ I sort of create this mental picture that we all have a stove, and we have these four or six pots on it. Some of the pots are on the front of the stove, because they’re really the hot ones, and some are on simmer. So we talk in terms of that.
You need to do things like that. You get up, you get out of your office, and decide that, all day, you’re just going to talk to everybody. If you can increase the amount of communication you have with your team, you have a really good chance of increasing the productivity, as well.
If someone would say they don’t have time, that they have too many other priorities to communicate on that level, I would ask them about it. Based on what they said, of all the things they need to do, what do they think is the most important thing on their stove? I might agree with the answer they give, but if I didn’t, I would try to steer them in another direction. And I would steer them, not tell them to drop what they’re doing and work on what I tell you to work on. That would be the wrong way to handle it, and it would be counterproductive.
It all comes out of the conversations you have with people. It takes more time, but through those conversations, you learn how to manage and motivate that person better, just based on one or two things they might say.