Follow up
It’s all well and good to set goals for your company and employees, but they still won’t get aligned if those goals aren’t clear and understood by everyone, so you have to check back with them.
“When you’re communicating with someone, setting expectations, you do some follow-up with different groups and levels and say, ‘Did the message get through?’” Bentsen says.
He does this by having people summarize to him what they heard when he’s conducting formal reviews.
“You’re working with me, and I’ll say, ‘Here are your performance goals for this year, and I want you to summarize those and put them back in the formal performance discussion process that we have,’” he says. “So one, it’s your ability to turn around and articulate those in a formal and structured manner and then through ongoing and frequent communication and interaction.”
Bentsen also likes to sit in with his managers when they do this with their team members so he can see that they are doing the same thing and that their people are seeing how they need to contribute.
He also follows up with people after large group meetings.
“One of the things that I’ve learned — you kind of know it, but you learn it the hard way sometimes — is what you believe you say is not always what people hear,” Bentsen says.
For example, when he had a practicewide conference call for his region, where there were hundreds and hundreds of people on the call, he knew there could be misunderstandings. So the next day, he had a call with 15 of his senior associates and asked them what they heard on the call the previous day.
“I went through four or five specific areas that I had addressed,” Bentsen says. “‘OK, this is a topic we covered. Somebody tell me what I said.’ I think just to have that follow-up — and that’s the goal of having this sort of feedback process is to say, ‘Did my message get through, was it understood, how could it have been interpreted by others?’ If everybody is sitting in different contexts and experiences and different things, what they hear is going through all those different filters.”
