Be open. Everyone talks about management by walking around. Be open and know your organization and have your ears to the ground so you’re aware of who are key leaders and stakeholders in your organization. It’s having people see you as a listener and as open to viewpoints. If you don’t, clearly people aren’t going to speak openly, and they’re not going to really engage in a process with true candor. And what you want is to have open and candid discussions that make sure that you’re really incorporating different viewpoints.
Part of it is the posture which one takes — a listening posture, an open posture, a willingness to engage different perspectives. It’s being able to show in the way you behave that you are willing to listen to different viewpoints. … Do you create an atmosphere or environment where people feel free to express differences of opinion and not feel like they will have repercussions for disagreeing or having different viewpoints? Don’t always respond immediately and debate, but allow people to present their viewpoint. It’s in the attitude and the way you encourage people. It’s not putting people down for expressing different viewpoints.
Have a plan. One of the things that happens so often is you may come up with a good direction but not come up with a tangible plan to move in that direction. You’ve got to have something that’s tangible and concrete so that a vision becomes a reality and doesn’t just stay in a theoretical framework. Once you come up with a direction that you want to take an organization in, communicate that, spend a lot of time making sure people understand it and have the opportunity to discuss it, and then be very consistent in how you move your organization forward to align with that vision.
Are you organizationally structured in a way that supports the vision? Do you have incentives within your organization that move people in that direction? Do your next level and next level down managers embrace this? And are they consistent about moving the organization in the same direction? Look at how you align your organization accordingly, and are there both the incentives to move in the direction the organization has chosen to move in and disincentives for not doing that.
That’s why you have performance appraisals and other ways of looking at performance. If you want people to start working more in a team-oriented approach, then as part of people’s performance, you measure how many projects were accomplished as a team as opposed to an individual behavior. Eventually, you’ll drive people more to a team approach. There are ways to have incentives and disincentives, and some of that may be through education and providing information, but it can also be how do you provide the right incentives to adapt to change behavior in ways that you think will strengthen your mission.
