Q. How do you get
employees to buy
in to the company’s
direction?
The best way to do
that is to lead by example. Don’t ask others to
do things they can’t see
you doing by yourself. Don’t
tell them — demonstrate to
them that you’re willing to do
those things that you are asking of them.
We’ve got some young people in our home office. Those
young people aspire to bigger
and better things. You want
them to, but you have to show
them that there is somebody
doing things the right way that
they can aspire to.
If you don’t provide that
opportunity for people to
model you, then you’re not
really building anything but a
house of cards. Too many
organizations suffer from
leadership that says one
thing and then does another.
All you do then is just confuse your troops.
To that, you have to add
some other ingredients. You
have to give people responsibility along with empowerment. Too many times, you see
people charged with the
responsibility to get something
done, but they get hamstrung
by the inability to do their
jobs. You’ve got to have a level
of trust.
As you want your subordinates to trust you, you have to
put trust back in them and
give them the room to do the
right job.
You need accountability all
the way around. They’re
accountable for what they do,
just as I’m accountable for
what I do. But you need to put
responsibility and accountability and empowerment into the
recipe, or it is not going to
come out correctly at the end.
Q. How do you ensure
that doesn’t happen in
your organization?
The No. 1 way is communication. If you set out on a
task at hand, and you charge
your people with their
responsibility for getting that
task achieved or accomplished, and they don’t check
in with each other along the
way, it would be like getting
on the interstate for what
should have been a 50-mile
trip, and 300 miles later
you’re still traveling in the
wrong direction because
nobody tapped you on the
shoulder, and you didn’t ask.
That’s why you need constant communication — not
to the point of micromanaging but gut-checking the initiatives that are going to lead
up to the fulfillment of the
task at hand being accomplished. Where help is needed, it’s being asked for or
provided — but not in a way
that micromanages anybody.
A constant level of communication in and of itself leads
to accountability. If somebody knows they’re going to
be checked in on, and there’s
going to be a report of their
progress, you have to be prepared to say something. It
keeps you focused.
HOW TO REACH: RetroTax, (770) 516-2718 or www.retrotax.com
