Develop your communication strategy
As important as you setting an example from the top, your
employees need to set the example for each other. That is an
increasingly difficult proposition as your company expands globally.
Hoffecker says open lines of communication are a key ingredient in forming a nimble, adaptable company. You can set up global networks for electronic communication, and e-mail and
portable devices like the BlackBerry are good for quick exchanges
of information. But you’re not going to create a community
approach to building for the future without periodically getting
your key innovators and decision-makers into the same room.
The periodic in-person meetings and more casual, day-to-day
forms of communication have to work in tandem to keep people
connected.
“It’s really a set you have to use in parallel,” he says. “We’ll get
together as an organization multiple times throughout the year, all
of Europe and the U.S., we’ll all get together, all of the leaders of
the business units. In those meetings, it’s critical to make sure we
are all together in person articulating and giving each other a
chance to talk, discuss, challenge where we’re going as a business,
what we’re doing and learn from each other.
“We also set it up so there are significant opportunities for people to interact on a day-to-day basis. That could be at a client site
or in the evening when a team goes out for dinner. They’ll be talking about what they can be doing, what others can be doing, but
they’ll be setting up those opportunities together.”
When managers can’t assemble in person at AlixPartners,
Hoffecker keeps people connected on a more frequent basis
through weekly conference calls.
“Every Friday, we have a call where all the business unit leaders
talk for an hour about what is going on in each one of their businesses, how they can change,” he says. “Then I immediately have
a meeting of all the leaders on my team to articulate what we’re
seeing, then go down to the next level of detail with the group.”
Hoffecker says you need to have a detailed, inclusive communication strategy because every person in your organization is going
to impact your ability to grow and serve your clients and customers, no matter how small his or her role may appear.
He says that, in the end, it’s always better to have an entire company of people who are enabled to communicate than to have a small brain trust leading the uninformed masses.
“We need everybody in our organization to have an impact on our
growth,” he says. “We need to make sure that everybody in the organization is a part of that and they feel like they understand how they
can have an impact. That means we need to be touching everybody
in the organization both on the vision side and the execution side on
a constant basis, so that they feel a part of it.”