Q. How do you gauge whether your intended message is getting through?
I keep my door open. I listen to what people are saying. I try to get around the office. I try to have as many informal contacts with people as possible during the day. You just have to be out there and be seen and keep your ears open. Communication is a two-way street, and oftentimes you learn as much by keeping your mouth shut and listening as you do by talking.
Are they repeating, in their own attitudes and words, what you’d like them to be saying? Are people upbeat or are they down? Is the griping more than usual? You can have a pretty good sense of where people’s attitudes are just by paying attention.
People sometimes have different views of where priorities ought to be. Making them understand that their individual priorities might have to be subordinated to what’s good for the whole firm is probably the most difficult challenge. How do you do that? You keep talking. You keep explaining. You keep listening. I’m not in a situation where I can just demand blind allegiance. So patience is probably the biggest virtue. You gradually explain and you build consensus with the other owners. So at the end of the day, the more people that have bought in, then sooner or later everybody gets the message.
It’s just a constant process. There’s just so much information available to anybody who turns on their computer these days, so much information that may, frankly, be wrong. If you just expect people to buy in without constant explanation and constant repetition, it’s not going to happen. You keep coming back to it at subsequent meetings, subsequent discussions. You just don’t let it stop at one. We’ll have items on the agenda three or four months until everybody is fully aware, [until] you start seeing some actual objective results.
At some point, you can only work the soft side so far. You just have to lay down some hard and fast rules: ‘You will get your time sheets in every week or maybe you don’t get your paycheck at the end of the week if that’s not done.’ So at some point, you just have to draw a line and say, ‘Look, we’ve talked this thing to death. Everybody’s on board with it but you. Now you’ve just got to get in line.’ You hope it doesn’t come to that too often, and usually, it doesn’t.
How to reach: Meyer, Unkovic & Scott LLP, (412) 456-2800 or www.muslaw.com
