Q. What is a pitfall to
avoid when creating a
team-oriented culture?
You can’t micromanage
a team. Everybody on the
team has to know what
their roles are. We do a lot
of cross-training so people
are aware of other people’s role and can step in.
If you have a situation
where your people are
functioning autonomously, and they are empowered to
do their jobs, if you try to micro-manage, it’s going to end up like
herding cats because they are
doing what you want them to
do, which is they are taking
authority and making decisions.
It’s almost like you are more in
a mentoring situation where
you are working together you are collaborating on decisions.
Q. How do you handle
employee mistakes?
Every employee is going to
make a mistake — all the time.
You just have to be ready for mistakes. Our customers make mistakes. Providers make mistakes.
It’s how you respond to those
mistakes. I think that we look at
those as opportunities. Every
time we make a mistake, there
is an opportunity to do a better
job. How did this mistake happen? We need to dive into it.
We have smoke; did we have
a fire? We need to solve that
problem right now. Is it a big
problem or a little problem?
What’s the scope of it?
So, when we had problems or
employees make mistakes, we
take them very seriously because
we would rather solve it when
it’s a small mistake rather than
when it is a huge problem.
Q. How can you prepare for
mistakes?
When you are encountering
situations, you have to be prepared for a good result, and
then you have to be prepared
for a bad result. When you are
getting a renewal of a customer
— of course, you want to get
the renewals — but you also
have to have a plan if it doesn’t
go through.
So, how do you prepare for
failure? I think by anticipation,
by meeting it head on, by handling it directly. The failures that
are the most difficult are the
ones you don’t anticipate —
they hit you by surprise. When
you have a situation like that,
you have to look back and say,
‘What did I miss? What did our
team miss? How could we have
responded differently. When did
things start to go wrong?’ It’s a
learning opportunity.
You need to be aware of it.
Your staff needs to be aware of
it. Generally, when we have a
difficult situation, that is a situation where you have to address
it immediately.
Usually, we sit down with the
staff, and we have a dialogue. I
usually lead the dialogue, and we
tell them what happened, why it
happened, answer questions so
they can have a forum for possibly being angry about why the
situation happened or maybe
suggestions for the future, and
then we move forward. We
keep the message positive.
HOW TO REACH: ReviewWorks, (248) 848-5100 or www.reviewworks.com
