Communicate with all levels
There was a great idea floating around the offices of MBA, but no one was doing anything about it. The company talked about digitizing everything it was doing, but the company thought it would be too expensive, and the idea was tabled.
However, during an employee group lunch with Lettelleir, someone brought the idea up again. This time, someone in the IT department knew of a way to make the idea a reality.
“What’s nice is our clients can now go onto the Web and they can actually pull up the documentation that they faxed or e-mailed over to us,” he says.
The idea helped sell some clients shortly thereafter because they were attracted to the electronic process.
No one planned the lunch to discuss the idea and there may not have even been a plan to bring up the idea, but because Lettelleir created the opportunity to interact with employees and for employees to interact with each other, there was initiative to push the idea forward.
“It starts a conversation that never would have took place, because they would have thought it was a dumb idea or, ‘I think it’s a good idea, but I’m not going to put my neck out there,’” he says.
Creating opportunities for you to get to know employees and employees to get to know each other is a major driver of developing a team environment.
Not only can great ideas come out of it, but it also gets people talking, which is sometimes hard when people are in silos working on daily tasks.
Of course, as you grow, that becomes more difficult as you spend more time on big-picture strategies and you add more employees.
Lettelleir ran into that problem as MBA grew from 20 employees to 100, but he didn’t completely stop trying. When the company was smaller, Lettelleir would take a new employee out to lunch to welcome him or her to the company and to get to know that person. But that has became harder as more employees joined, so he started the “12 at 12” program.
“I get 12 people from all different departments and have lunch in the conference room and just kind of go around and find out where everybody is from and if they have family and what their interests are,” he says. “I just kind of get a little flare for what they do and then give them an open forum to ask questions.”
Lettelleir likes to do the lunch every month, but sometimes because of his schedule, he can only do it every other month. Employees are randomly selected from different departments, but he tries to invite newer employees who haven’t participated before. You want to keep the number of people participating at one time small, because the bigger the group, the less people will want to talk.
“We have a monthly team meeting where everybody is there, but when you’ve got 100 people, it’s less likely somebody has a question or anything else that they are going to raise their hand in the middle of a big group,” he says. “This gives them a little bit of a forum to ask questions and offer ideas and advice.”
You will get some great ideas in forums like this, but you will also get a number of suggestions that don’t work. In that case, you have to explain to the person who came up with the idea why you can’t use it.
“I definitely think it is important to explain that and certainly get their buy-in, because you don’t want them walking away with the answer of, ‘No, we’re not going to do that,’” he says. “Because then it squashes their reason for even wanting to talk out loud and express their ideas and come to the table with something new.”
It also helps to be honest and admit that you know not everyone is going to see your side of things.
“One of the things that I preach from our end is, ‘You’re not going to always agree with my decision, but I hope you will at least understand my reasons for making that decision,’” he says.
“I try to get everybody’s feedback, and I encourage our department heads and managers to do the same. Get everybody’s feedback. Get the information because there may be something you are missing or don’t know about. Get it all and then make the decision and if somebody doesn’t agree with the decision, at least explain why you are making that decision.”