Communicate
Throughout his career, McQuay has learned the importance of
communication. When he sits down with his employees, they
enjoy coffee together and excitedly talk, but this discussion does-n’t have to do with his vision or goals for the company. Instead, it
centers around how upset they are with their beloved Dallas
Cowboys.
He holds these “Coffee with the boss” sessions to simply open up
the lines of communication, but he doesn’t care what the communication centers around.
“If employees decide they want to talk about the economy, we
can talk about the economy,” McQuay says. “If they want to talk
about how upset they are with the Dallas Cowboys, they can talk
about that. It’s about bringing the reality of the fact that business
is a part of them, but it’s not necessarily all there is. Life and your
family are the critical components of what make you the best you
can be at your job.”
If you’re not quite sure how to talk to people or what’s important to your employees, McQuay says to tap into your own early
days.
“Focus on where you came from and the things that got you
inspired in your previous jobs, and a lot of the things that have
affected you have not necessarily been the specifics of how you
make a widget,” he says. “They’re generally about the parallels of
what you can utilize to connect what you do in the rest of your life
with what you’re doing at work and help you focus on the importance of both.”
While informal communication is important, you also have to get
the formal aspects of the business out, as well. McQuay meets
quarterly with all of his employees, weekly with his senior staff,
and then individual departments also have weekly meetings.
Constant communication is important to moving forward.
“Everything in business is a constantly changing and moving
ball — there’s always something else to keep your eye on,” he
says.
In formal communications, you can’t just talk without people
understanding, so to be more effective, try to connect the business
message to a life message.
“Try to draw a focus on the basics of the business and how it
relates to what everybody can understand,” McQuay says. “In
other words, you draw parallels to mom-and-pop stories or family
budgeting or those kinds of things so that everyone can relate to
the issues at hand.”
Despite your best efforts to make connections for people, they
still may not be getting it.
“You have to constantly follow up on what you’ve communicated — when you’re engaging with employees within the operation
and you’re talking to them about what’s happening at this particular point in time,” McQuay says. “You ask them, and how they
respond to your inquiries about those priorities gives you a good
idea of if they get it or they don’t get it. Then you have to recraft
your mission and your message because they don’t understand
where you’re going with a particular issue.”
Having multiple communication points helps people better
understand your objectives and feel more connected to the business.
“By human nature, people have a tendency to cycle around
things that they can understand and things that mean something to
them, and we don’t want to miss an opportunity to get that word
across,” McQuay says. “… It’d be simple if everybody responded to
one type of communication, but not everyone does. You can have
it in newsletters, e-mails. You can address it one on one when you
encounter people in their daily work. You can do it in coffee with
the boss, and you can still find that there are those that won’t be
getting that message, so it’s constantly striving to get the message
out to everyone.”