Empower your people
Desjadon knew what he wanted from his employees. He wanted them to provide fast, fair and reliable service to the company’s clients. He wanted clients to walk away from their experience with Florida Peninsula the same way he felt after flying Continental, with a sense that the employees really understood customer needs and did their best to fulfill them.
In order to accomplish that, you have to ask yourself a question: Why are you in business?
“Once you have that, filling in the details of the landscape is where you start to bring everyone into the process,” Desjadon says.
While you have a clear idea of what you want from your people, it’s never as simple as issuing a three- to four-line statement of what you expect and then never having to say another word.
You need to work with your people and give them a sense of belonging to the process.
“One thing people need to pay attention to is what kind of environment they create for their employees,” Desjadon says. “A lot of organizations hire people that they think are really qualified people, but then they give them a very narrow definition of their role and they totally underutilize them. What that does is it frustrates people tremendously. When you hire highly qualified individuals and you pay them well, you need to be willing to give them more than they can handle and allow them to rise to the occasion.”
Get employees involved in the discussion about what would make your company better and show them that you value their input. Don’t just tell them what to do and how to do it.
“There’s a whole bunch of reasons why telling everyone how to do something just doesn’t work anymore,” Desjadon says. “No. 1, it’s not very productive. No. 2, it’s not very rewarding for the people. No. 3, it tends to foster that organization where people just sit back and say to themselves, ‘You know what, as long as I do exactly what the boss tells me to do, exactly how he tells me to do it, I can’t be wrong.’ There’s no risk taking, there’s no buy-in. That’s an organization that is just fulfilling somebody else’s role. That’s destined for failure.”
It’s how you end up in a situation where employees aren’t looking to do the best they can to find solutions for your customers. Rather, they are trying to make sure they follow your strict guidelines, whether it helps the customer or not.
“People are nervous about allowing folks to exercise a lot of latitude,” Desjadon says. “When you really think about it, it’s silly. If I’ve done a good job and management and ownership has done a good job in communicating the landscape and building a landscape and communicating how you fit into it, why should I fear how you’re going to respond to that?”
