Collaboration is good
It’s one thing to have your department heads tuned in to how things work in their part of the world, but John Qualls wants them to have a say in how other departments at BlueLock do things, too.
“Let’s just say that you’re the vice president of sales,” says Qualls, the co-founder of BlueLock, which has 34 employees and provides cloud computing and managed IT services. “I’ve given you a goal to meet for client experience. I’ve asked you, ‘What are you going to do in sales to make sure our customers have a great experience?’ It’s always easy to say, ‘Well, this is what I’m going to do.’ Now I’m asking you, ‘What do you think your peers in finance, marketing, operations and R&D and your other peers on the executive team, what do you think they need to do to achieve this?’”
The idea is to get a dialogue going in which important company matters are out on the table for everyone to discuss.
“Each person presented what they believed they needed to do for that given objective to be successful,” Qualls says. “Then they heard from their peers what that was. That was a pretty powerful exercise. It was a great team-building exercise. It really showed the gaps of where the alignment was off. But everyone came away from that exercise knowing what they needed to do.”