Communicate
As Hyland Software redid its large HR system, it was a huge project that touched everybody as they tried to consolidate other systems into it. It also forced managers to be more accountable on certain things, so there was a lot going on with it. Even though Hyland had talked about why they were doing the project multiple times, people were still getting upset.
“As you get further along in the project, people get angry about certain things and you have to reset everybody,” he says.
That’s where communication comes in, which is another critical element to the company’s growth. Hyland says he was naïve when he was younger in that he thought he could just go out and say what the company was doing and where it was going, and everyone would get it.
“You wonder why people wander off in a different direction — ‘Wait a minute! They’re not following me?’” he says. “It’s just getting the discipline down of talking about things fairly consistently and then creating avenue and mechanisms at the global level and departmental level that reinforce that vision or the values or whatever it is you’re trying to get across.”
So he’s become more disciplined in his communication approach. To start, he’s created a small group of several vice presidents and meets with them about once a quarter to ask them how he’s doing with his communication. He’ll ask where they think the company is on a certain issue, what they think he just communicated about it or what their team thinks about it. He’ll ask what is fuzzy about what he said or what didn’t link right with people.
“It’s been eye-opening for me,” he says. “I won’t let them talk and hear each other so they can’t mold their answers. I actually make them write them before we talk about them so I get the raw feedback before we get mob mentality.”
Doing this helps him see that he hasn’t projected the real reasons he’s doing something or what the purpose behind something was. Hyland says that when you get a group of intelligent people who know you and the business really well, they can really help shed light into your communication efforts.
“Creating that and being humble enough to take that is the key advice to just create a group of individuals who do that,” he says.
He’s also done this with employees and asked them a couple strategic questions to see if they really understand where the company is heading. Sometimes he sees that newer employees don’t get it but older employees do, and sometimes he sees that everyone gets it.
“If you’re willing to open yourself up to the feedback, people will talk,” he says. “It may take them a little time, but they will talk and they will say, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ The advice I would give to any leader is open yourself up. Put the target on your shirt and just take it. It’s going to forge you as a better leader, period. If you think you know everything or you’re God’s gift to whatever, that’s great, but you’re not going to evolve as an individual, and you’re not going to be a stronger leader three years from now.”
In the case of the HR system, it was clear from the feedback that employees didn’t understand the point. Hyland recognized that it was creating different work for everyone, and change doesn’t make people happy, so he spent five minutes at the Monday-morning meeting talking about it. He explained why it was important, why they needed to do it from an employee-development and career-development perspective, how they didn’t have a consolidated system, why it was strategically important as a business, and how people are crucial and doing this keeps turnover rates low.
“Immediately, people said there was a massive upswing in involvement and energy behind it, and it just took five minutes for the leader to say, ‘OK, everybody, I know there’s pain, but get through it – there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re not just doing this to put you through pain, but there’s actually something valuable here that we want to get to,’” he says. “Sometimes we need a little reminder.”
He says you don’t want to do this every single time you communicate to people, though, but rather when you get feedback that the simpler message isn’t getting through.
“If you do this every week, you drive people nuts — ‘Oh here he goes again,’” Hyland says. “But once every six or eight weeks — ‘OK, he’s actually thinking about things.’”
HOW TO REACH: Hyland Software, (440) 788-5000 or www.hyland.com
