Talk to your people
You need to first be in touch with your own employees about what’s happening in your business. If you tell outsiders about a new development before you discuss it with your own people, you’re asking for trouble.
Wadsworth wants his employees to feel as though he is speaking directly to them when he talks. He wants them to know that his focus is on that conversation and not on something else.
“I rarely use notes,” Wadsworth says. “I’m speaking and looking at them in the eye. I always try to invite questions and I tell them they can ask me anything they want. There is no taboo topic.”
Wadsworth likes to point out the tough questions that his mother used to ask him about whether he knew what he was doing as an illustration of his willingness to be challenged.
“I tell them, ‘Please ask what you want because it’s an opportunity to do that. If you don’t, please send me an e-mail,’” Wadsworth says. “I respond to every e-mail I receive.”
If you want to ensure that your communication hits home, then you cannot ignore questions that you are asked or fail to respond to e-mails. If people ask you questions or send you e-mails, especially if you prompted them to do so, then respond.
“A lot of them are things I don’t have to respond to because somehow my name gets on a lot of lists,” Wadsworth says of the hundreds of e-mails he gets each day. “But when employees send me an e-mail, business partners, people in the community, I respond to all of them. I think that’s important. I have help, but I respond to everything.”
You often have to go out of your way to show people that you do want to hear from them. Telling them once usually isn’t enough.
“I think I’m the most approachable person there is,” Wadsworth says. “It’s clear that I’m not. People are intimidated by the title. I think I’m approachable and I encourage people to talk to me, so I feel I am. But then it’s clear that it’s not that easy.”
Wadsworth flashes back to his younger days when he was an employee at Lockheed.
“The CEO of Lockheed, he encouraged us to ask him questions and it was intimidating,” Wadsworth says. “I try not to be and I try to share personal experiences when I meet with employees and groups so I come across as human and not something else. But that’s another good challenge. People assume that you don’t have time for them or that you won’t like a tough question or so on and so forth. You just have to encourage them to break those barriers.”
Be yourself and let the passion you feel for the work you’re doing show through when you meet with your employees. Take advantage of the power that you have to make things happen and to capture attention. That kind of energy can only help in your efforts to break down those barriers.
“You’re responsible for everything from human resources to the crisis of the day to communications,” Wadsworth says. “It’s a version of the buck stops here, but it’s also because you touch everything in the organization. You have the opportunity to make decisions and the prioritizations and the investments because you have that breadth of reach and responsibility.”
