Make employees feel comfortable providing feedback. You have to set a culture. People have to feel like they’re empowered to take some risk, and that failure from time to time is a learning process.
You can’t have a high rate of failure, but you empower people to step out of their comfort zone. If that gets into the culture, then I find it easy to get feedback because they feel comfortable talking to the boss about their thoughts.
You start by articulating that that is your style. Then it’s a matter of examples of where you selectively pick situations at all levels to empower them to take on something new or different, and they can feel your support in that process.
Their peer level will know that they either had a positive experience in stepping out or a negative experience.
The people who are doing the task know what is impeding their ability to do it more efficiently or with higher quality. And so gaining that feedback from the people at the doing level is critical — it may not be the solution, but it may be the key that allows you to develop a solution that’s better.
Clearly articulate the vision. It’s important to come up with an acronym that, over time, everyone relates to the vision statement. Our vision statement is geared around reaching high standards of high-quality service … but it’s a paragraph, so we use the catchphrase ‘client service satisfaction.’
So when I say client service satisfaction in a meeting, hopefully all of our people have a similar concept of what that means. But if you only go with the vision or mission statement, it tends to be a little bit unwieldy, even if it’s only a long paragraph.
You can’t repeat the statement every time you want to refer to it, and therefore, bits and pieces can be picked, and it may not have a similar meaning. Whereas if you use (a catch-phrase), I find people tend to get close to the same concept.
The hardest part is finding the (catchphrase). Most times, you can find a couple of keywords that you can put together, whether it rhymes or fits. … Hopefully, it has words in it that clearly show the direction. So it’s trying to pick something that’s catchy and easy for them to remember.
It doesn’t take long for new people to get on the same page to relate that to the overall paragraph, and then they have a common thought process.
Stay focused on the vision. In the heat of battle, sometimes it’s easy to get off course. From time to time in a meeting, just going back to our vision and challenging ourselves to say, ‘In the last month or two, have we stayed on track with where we’re going, have we got off message?’ It’s easy to get off message, so it’s important to circle back at least with the top brass to make sure we think we’re on message.
The hardest part is to make sure you recognize you did get off message. You’ve got to pick one or two things that you can use with your leadership so that everybody focuses on heading back the message, but you’ve got to be careful you don’t have too many.
If you’ve got one or two things you can instill in your leadership to say, ‘We’ve got to be focusing on these things; we’ve got to be articulating these things,’ I find that the best way to try to get back on track.
Too many times, I’ve seen organizations come up with five ways to get back on track; that’s too many.
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