Q. How do you get
employees to buy in to
your vision?
You have to be viewed
as a mentor of somebody
that they really can rely
on because really we
employ quite a few people. If they have no confidence in your ability to
move a company in a certain direction, if they have
no confidence in your
intellect, it’s going to be awfully
hard to convince them to follow
you and to buy in to your vision.
Certainly, they need to respect
you from an intellectual standpoint based on your track
record, based on your intelligence and how you convey the
message to them. You can have
a person that is a great visionary, but they may be a poor
communicator and cannot convey the vision to their team. As
a result, they lose their team. To
be able to communicate and to
have the respect of your people,
and for them to look up to you
as a mentor is very important.
Q. How can you be a mentor?
People have different interpretations of leadership. Quite honestly, depending on what you
are in, depending whether you
work for a large company, a
small company, military, I think
leadership takes on different
forms. You can have a very quiet
leader that’s very effective. You
have leaders that lead by example. You have leaders that gain
respect and are able to lead
because of their intelligence
because they are successful and
have been able to perform great
things. You have many different
interpretations of leadership.
You look at somebody like
the president of the United
States of America, like Lincoln,
for example, who was a very
quiet leader, but very effective
in his leadership skills. Then,
you have other people that are
incredibly charismatic and people view them as very good
leaders because they are very
good communicators. But, I
think, truly an effective leader
has to be a combination of all
of those qualities.
Q. How do you become a
good communicator?
To be a really good communicator, you need to be able to
get in to people’s feelings. You
need to be able to move them,
make them happy. You need to
be able to get in to their core.
That’s very important. Certainly,
the communication, the way
you speak is very important
and how you project your
voice is very important. To be
very clear, very concise.
They say that you should
probably stick to three items to
discuss. They all say that
because anything more than
that they lose people’s attention. People have very short
attention spans. So, whenever
you are conveying an execution plan, it’s very important
that you speak clearly, you are
very concise, that your ideas
are very clearly laid out — that
you stick with maybe three, no
more than five, points to get
the message across.
HOW TO REACH: OpTech LLC, (313) 962-9000 or www.optechus.com
