Become a teacher
Holveck started out with a broad vision for constructing Endo’s future. But the vision would never come to life if he didn’t continue to encourage the involvement of his employees.
Without employee involvement, a vision is just a set of words. Your managers and employees bring it to life. Getting employees to take ownership of your vision begins with rolling the vision out, but it really happens through months and years of consistent communication that allows employees to stay plugged in to what is happening at the 30,000-foot level of the organization.
Holveck says the best kind of communication usually happens on a smaller scale. He tries to reinforce his vision on a personal level, in group meetings of 25 or less.
“I give my view of what is going on in the company in that point in time, and then I throw it open for questions,” he says. “It has been very successful, because when you get a venue of that size, people feel like they can ask questions. Over time, those individuals are kind of informally deputized to speak to their colleagues about what they heard at these smaller meetings. Then the dialogue starts to happen, information starts to flow and you get people who are more interested and involved.”
Ultimately, employees will feel engaged with your plan and empowered to take ownership of it when they feel a strong sense of trust in management. That can be a longer process. It’s one thing to get your employees to understand your vision. It’s a completely different level of involvement when they are willing to trust and follow you.
“That is why it’s so important to have those meetings in smaller venues,” Holveck says. “It’s the trust factor that gets established between leadership and the employees, to the point that what you hope will occur over time is they start to own that strategic direction because they believe in it and are a part of it.”
If the process had a 100 percent conversion rate, it would be as simple as keeping your message in front of everyone. However, your message, even repeated multiple times in different venues and forms, isn’t going to be the magic spell that converts everyone to your line of thinking.
If you’re the new leader coming into a successful situation like Holveck was, you will likely encounter some resistance to change. It could be a great deal of resistance, depending on how entrenched the culture of inertia is.
“You have to accept that you won’t win all the people over,” Holveck says. “People who have been successful aren’t always open to change. Given the economic environment that we’re in, you try to be very direct in the explanation but very firm in the fact that we’re going to change. The elements of change are going to occur, we’re going to be successful at it, and it’s not an infinite period of time that people will be given to accept the change and work with it.”
You will have to walk a balance beam between your vision and your employees. You must communicate that change is inevitable, but you need to give stragglers and those who resist an adequate amount of time to change their tune and jump on board. You largely have to proceed based on your feel for the situation and whether there has been any progress in bringing the stragglers along.
“You do try to give every opportunity to come to terms on both a direction and a reason for the change, but at some point, you have to find some kind of definite conclusion with each person. If no change is evident, I find that people make their own decisions and move on because it’s an environment that may not suit them.”
