Achieve boardroom balance
You need to send the right messages to your people, and you need to give them the opportunity to deliver feedback to you. But as important as how you communicate, you need to have the right people in place to turn your strategic plan into a reality.
“You need to be very selective with the people that you know,” Sykes says. “I’ve had the benefit of knowing people who have the same beliefs and aspirations as I do, so I was able to recruit them. The recruits I didn’t know all that well, I was able to find out about them, whether they had a reputation for the same belief system.
“Each individual came at it not from an individual point of view but as a team. That is what we are building here at JHS. There is a team environment. You need to bring people together and make them believe in a common cause, while allowing them to voice their feelings and opinions. You’re going to have disagreements, but you don’t want to become disagreeable.”
A key part of managing disagreements is managing personalities. You’re going to find strong personalities on just about any management team. It’s one of the reasons your managers rose to management positions in the first place. But with strong-willed people comes the potential for disagreements and clashing, which can lead to full-on powder keg situations if not managed correctly by the executives on the team.
As the leader, you need to dig down on the personalities of each person you directly manage and find out what makes him or her tick. You need to find out what motivates your employees, what irritates them and how you can best prod each person to deliver the best results.
“I remember I had two guys at Sykes who were pretty much mercenaries,” Sykes says. “They were just flat-out mercenaries in how they conducted their business. They were interested in what they could do to benefit themselves. A lot of people asked me why I had them on my team, and you keep them around because they’re successful. Consequently, I knew what drove them. When I would set up incentive programs, I set up programs that would drive them. That’s what you have to do all over your team — find out what fuels them.”
Always remember that every person on your team has a different personality, different needs, and each might approach a problem in an entirely unique way.
“Once, someone asked General Omar Bradley, ‘Why do you give General Patton so many headlines?’” Sykes says. “And he said, ‘A headline a day gets him a mile a day with the tanks.’ What that says to me is that all of us run on different fuel, and we as leaders and managers have to determine what the different personalities are and what fuel they run on. All of us don’t have the same DNA, so this is where we really have to shine as leaders. We have to be able to put together people with different opinions, different approaches and different needs, and be able to know how to fuel those needs in a way that accomplishes a common cause.”
