See what your people can do
Pollack knew he needed to work effectively with hospitals and providers in South Florida if his company was to expand its presence in the region. At the same time, he had a young company with leaders who didn’t have a wealth of experience to fall back on.
But Pollack chose not to make any assumptions about the skills his people did or did not have. He would be ready to provide help and guidance if it was needed, but he would resist the urge to act as if he was the company savior.
“Just because you’re in a supervisory role doesn’t mean you have to micromanage or that you have to be involved in every single decision they are making,” Pollack says. “They were doing their job before you became their supervisor and they’re going to continue to do their job. As you learn what they are doing in a more detailed way, you can begin to coach them on things you want them to prioritize or do a little bit differently. But to me, you can’t go in there immediately and say, ‘I’m your supervisor and things are going to change.’ That heavy-handedness doesn’t work.”
If you go in with an open mind, you may find out that your employees already have a sense of how things could be done better.
“Usually an individual has ideas about what they want to change, what they would like to do differently and what they want to do better,” Pollack says. “So you can begin to bring that out by asking questions rather than directing immediately. My experience has been that most people really do want to do things more efficiently. … You can at least begin the conversation with those ideas and evaluate what they are thinking. Some of them may be great. Some of them may not be so good. But you can at least have an open dialogue about those ideas without feeling like it’s coming from the top down.”
Pollack recalled a prior experience with a woman who had been his peer for a long period of time. Then Pollack was promoted, and suddenly, he was her boss.
It offered him an enduring lesson on how to be an effective manager of people and why you shouldn’t make assumptions about what your people do or don’t know.
“I didn’t make her change just because she was now reporting to me,” Pollack says. “What we did do was really have an open discussion about priorities and about where she was spending her time, where she would like to be spending her time and how I thought she could better spend her time and the resources she needed to better her department.”
Pollack didn’t have a lot of time to get to know people at Molina before he became president. But that just meant he had to work even harder to build the important relationships that encourage people to open up about what they need to do their jobs better.
“People see how you treat people, how you react to people and how you handle adversity,” Pollack says. “To me, the leader has to be the calmest one in the group. People see that and they say, ‘Hey, this is something we have to resolve,’ rather than choosing to hide it for their own benefit.”
In order make it safe for people to bring concerns out in the open, you need to be the one out there asking the questions and showing them that it’s OK.
“You have to get out of your office,” Pollack says. “You have to talk to people. You can’t just talk to the people who you have your direct reporting relationships with. I’m not talking to them to put them on the spot or to grill them. You really just want to understand.”