Listen to those around you
There is some degree of speaking from the center in leadership. As important as it is to get input from employees, you should always be communicating back to them, as well.
Sometimes, that’s just to keep them informed and answer questions about issues that come up through your walk-arounds and client feedback. You can do that through multiple methods, from monthly newsletters to an intranet and team meetings to marketwide all-hands meetings at the start of each fiscal year.
Corbett also does that more intimately by pooling groups of employees to discuss topics in a smaller setting, which she describes as both mini town halls and fireside chats. About every six months, groups of 10 or 12 staff members sit with a partner. The partner explains what you’ve been hearing from employees and clients while reiterating bigger messages like the importance of building relationships with each other and with clients.
You can adjust the messages and methods based on the input you get back. For example, Corbett realized that her employees — especially younger ones who haven’t experienced a recession — were feeling pressed by the economy. So, it became a mini town hall topic.
You can also look for cues about how your employees communicate to adapt your methods. Corbett saw the tools young employees were using and rolled them out across her market, for example.
“A lot of the young people really like to be connected electronically, so we have our own internal Web pages that are unique to each of the offices,” she says. “There’s lots of information for them and lots of forums for them to give us their feedback and communicate.”
Corbett arranges similar mini meetings with customers, too, bringing several of them to sit in on executive board meetings. In addition to hearing about your thought leadership on a topic, customers can also learn what their other peers are doing about it.
Those round tables are preceded by plenty of research about the market, such as CEO surveys, to ferret out topics that are relevant to them. The forums are further planned with a steering committee. But it’s not made of PricewaterhouseCoopers employees; it’s the clients themselves decidin
g what would make the most meaningful conversations for them.
“That [study and research] is a starting point,” Corbett says. “And then it’s listening to our clients as to what part of that they want to hear about. So there’s this ongoing dialogue.”
You can keep the atmosphere more open and relaxed by keeping the meeting small.
“The key is to keep it small and intimate and create that one-on-one feeling, that feeling of trust,” she says.
