Bring managers closer
to workers
Marhofer looked at why the new dealership was failing and also at the paralysis
that gripped the employees at his Hyundai
store. The decision-making process was
getting bogged down because everything
was funneled through one manager. Things
were taking too long to get done, and if the
person at the top wasn’t in touch with the
customer, the company’s decisions could
be leading it in the wrong direction. From
that, he decided he had to eliminate the
management hierarchies that enabled a
general manager to become a dictator.
He knew his first step was to find a way
to open up the decision-making process to
everyone. He needed to find a way to get
his employees to speak up when they had
ideas and a way to make managers like his
“control freak” listen to those ideas.
One way Marhofer improved the flow of
communications within his company was
by taking his employees off-site to his farm
for team-based activities. The activities are
designed to tackle his team’s communication problems head-on, and the divide
between the take-charge bosses and the
more reserved employees becomes apparent almost immediately.
After an activity, Marhofer asks the team
members to analyze their performance in
the challenge. Usually, at that point, some
employees will begin saying things like, “I
had a good idea but nobody would listen to
me.”
Once the teams reach that point, the
problem is out in the open. Marhofer tells
the teams that if they want to succeed, they
will need to improve the way they are communicating. The impatient, take-charge
personalities need to slow down and listen
to what their co-workers have to say, and
the more reserved employees with great
ideas need to feel comfortable enough to
voice their ideas.
“People become aware of, ‘Hey, I need to
speak up in meetings and share my ideas,’
and other people in leadership became
aware of, ‘Hey, I need to shut up and listen,’” he says. “Nobody is really confronted with it in a threatening way, but they
become aware of it. … Most people will
take it kind of seriously.”
Once your employees are beginning to realize the importance of communicating with
each other, the next step is getting the lesson
to translate to the workplace. Marhofer asks
his employees for examples of specific times
when a lack of communication has hindered
the company’s business.
“We say, ‘Let’s relate this to work,’” he
says. “Does this ever happen at work? Do
we ever have a challenge presented to us
and we just go off and react to it? We don’t
take the time to huddle up and say, ‘OK,
how are we going to deal with this?’”
From there, Marhofer asks for examples
of ways that the team could have handled
one of those situations better. For instance,
an employee could have gathered input
from his or her co-workers instead of simply making a decision based on his or her
own thoughts. Conversely, employees who
oppose a plan could have made their reservations become public instead of just
rolling their eyes and griping about it later.
Marhofer says off-site activities like the
team-building exercises he supervises at his
farm can help your employees learn how to
overcome the manager-employee divide and
improve interoffice communication.
