Open a dialogue
Engaging your managers is a great first step, but only if the engagement continues throughout the organizational ranks. And one of the most effective ways to do that is to give employees feedback channels. Personal contact is always best, but electronic methods such as e-mail are useful, as well.
By showing employees a concrete way that their ideas and input can help better the company, you’re showing them that they can help steer the organization, which will increase their level of buy-in with regard to the vision, mission and values.
“Great ideas come from all of [your] constituencies,” Rubin says. “If you don’t foster a culture that creates great ideas, then you’re not going to be successful. If we only solicit ideas from select people within the company, we’re going to miss out on a lot of opportunities.”
But with open feedback channels comes the need to review the feedback you get. Rubin and his management team integrate the feedback and idea review process into their strategic planning meetings. It gives them an opportunity to see if a new idea might fit with the company’s overall direction.
“You have to have the right strategy and the right financial plan and align those with your organizational goals to get everyone working together on new ideas,” Rubin says. “Each year we have a formalized strategic planning process, and out of that comes a financial planning process, which is used to get everyone in line with what we’re trying to do as a company. That gets cascaded down to individual departments and through to our individual department goals, and that’s how we get everyone focused and working together.”
As necessary as the vertical communication between management and the lower rungs of your organization is, lateral communication between departments is another key component in building a culture, reinforcing the vision, mission and values, and sharing ideas.
Rubin says that many departmental managers are more experienced in a hierarchical setting, where they’re overseeing subordinates and answering to superiors. Finding department heads who excel at taking a cross-functional approach to leadership can become a bit more challenging.
“It goes back to hiring the right people, then you have to get them into situations where they interact, and you can focus them on growing their departments by interacting with each other and sharing their expertise,” he says. “Since people tend to manage better up and down within an organization than they do horizontally, one of the qualities you have to look for during the recruiting and interviewing process is people who have a history of doing well in a cross-functional environment.
“Once you have the right people, you need the right level of alignment in order to create a cross-functional environment. Alignment happens through the goal-setting and goal-connecting process. If you can do those two things, the rest falls into place, and you will be able to get people on the departmental level who work together and make each other better.
“That is probably our biggest opportunity and, in a lot of ways, our most challenging. It’s what we talk about in our (leadership training) program — get connected, align the different goals and objectives, and make sure all those goals are connected. If you can’t do that, you have no shot of being successful as an organization.”
How to reach: GSI Commerce Inc., (610) 491-7000 or www.gsicommerce.com