Be accessible. My calendar’s open so anybody can book time; literally, anyone can go into Microsoft Outlook and put a meeting on my calendar. And I accept it.
No. 2, we don’t have offices, so I have a cubicle. You hear a lot more, and it makes you a lot more accessible so people just stop by and say, ‘Hey, in two minutes I want to show you something,’ or, ‘I want to ask you a question,’ or whatever. Being willing to spend that time is really important.
Those are the more informal stuff. More of the structured stuff, I do what we call a share session every other month. Think of it as office hours from college, like a scheduled meeting, and I invite the entire company to it and there’s no set agenda. It’s kind of whatever’s on your mind, ask me any question.
And then on our intranet, I blog every other week: ‘Here’s what I’m focused on, here’s what I want you focused on.’ But it’s an open-feed so anybody can respond to it and chime in with ideas and thoughts.
[There are] a lot of ways to biopsy the organization. I talk about it as thread-pulling. You hear one thing; you just pull on it a little bit. As long as you’re getting enough of that, you always have a pretty good view of what’s happening.
Let employees find the answers. Too often, I think leaders are viewed as needing to have all the answers. And I don’t believe that I have all the answers. I have a much more collaborative leadership style and more of a focus-and-release as opposed to dictate-and-supervise or anything like that. We just need people to go ahead and explore and experiment and take risks, as opposed to wait for someone to tell them what to do.
First off, you can’t just say it; you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to give them the ability to make those decisions and live with the consequences of them. It can’t be me making all the decisions; they have to be able to make the decisions. And so you literally have to give up decision-making, and they have to be able to go off and do it.
When I weigh in on decisions, usually I say, ‘Look, I’m just giving you ideas. You have to make these calls, not me, because you’re ultimately accountable for it.’
Follow up on feedback. No. 1, if you actually take some of their ideas and you build it into your plan, that sure helps. And if you’re not, then I think you have the obligation to say, ‘Hey, look, I got a lot of this feedback, and I’m telling you why I’m not doing that, I’m doing this.’ That’s OK, too.
But there needs to be the feedback loop both ways. So just because you hear more doesn’t mean you’ve communicated back more.
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