Listen clearly. To be an effective communicator and start to be open, you have to listen to people first. Be authentic in how you listen to them before you maybe respond to them or disagree with them.
Part of it is building an environment where you actually encourage employees to challenge your thinking. When you do that and actually take in that new information and change decisions that have been made or go down a new path, I think that reinforces to people in the organization that you’re a company that does take feedback from employees to heart. That builds that openness and that trust.
A lot of it starts at the top. It is about how you carry yourself as an executive. I encourage my direct reports to challenge my thinking. Then, the idea is that they likely encourage the folks that report to them to challenge their thinking.
You have to practice what you preach. Go out and really seek that interaction with people in your organization. You can’t be an executive that gets comfortable sitting inside your four walls.
Gauge whether employees trust you. You start to know it when you get a sense that they are starting to challenge, in a constructive way, decisions that get made that they don’t think are the right decisions or their willingness to ask a tough question and not be worried about asking that tough question.
When you start to see two-way interaction, that is a sign that you actually are building up trust, and I also think that sometimes it’s one of those things where you just have a sense of it.
Let’s say there’s something important that the company needs to get done in a short period of time dealing with an unexpected customer issue or there’s some new sales opportunity that just came down but it’s going to require the involvement of a number of different folks from the organization.
When you start to see people rally together in almost a self-initiated team environment, I think that’s indicative that you’re building not just this trust inside the company, but that’s evolving to enthusiasm for people to really try to do what they can do for the greater good of the company.
How to reach: Genea Energy, (714) 694-0536 or www.geneaenergy.com
