Foster collaboration
Employees need stability and communication from the top of the organization in a challenging business climate. But communication can’t just flow downward. It needs to move upward and laterally, from employees to management and from department to department.
McMillin has helped to entrench that mindset by linking bonuses to company goals. It comes back to the idea that if the company doesn’t provide a healthy, constructive work environment, no one within the company will have a healthy mindset. The need increases exponentially during hard times.
“We always encourage people to work together for common goals,” McMillin says. “Our bonus system has always operated on companywide success, not project by project or even division by division. A company has to do well, otherwise projects won’t succeed, our credit is no good and other bad things start snowballing.
“The company has to be healthy, so that is why you need people who are working for the greater good. Bonuses based on the company’s overall performance is one way to make that happen. It enables us to buy new projects, negotiate existing projects with partners and so forth. If the company is not healthy, no one is healthy.”
You also need to make collaboration a priority when recruiting. If you bring collaborative example-setters into the mix, those employees can set an example for the rest of the company, helping to promote a focus on the company’s large-scale goals. But that focus needs to start with you and your human resources staff and the type of people you let in the door.
“It’s all in the personalities you find during the hiring process,” McMillin says. “During the question-and-answer dialogue of an interview, you ask questions about that person’s professional history and how they interacted at previous jobs. You find out what type of employee this person was for their previous employer. Listen carefully to their answers. If you hear a lot of ‘me, me, me’ instead of ‘We did this’ or ‘We did that,’ you need to watch out.”
If you’re hiring and grooming employees who value collaboration, you need to make sure that you’re not discouraging the behavior that you want to see out of them. Many business leaders trumpet their company’s open-door policy. The notion that employees can pop into the president’s or CEO’s office on a whim is used so often in business that it has become a cliché — to the point that employees now often view the phrase “open-door policy” with a heavy dose of skepticism.
Simply saying that you have an open-door policy isn’t enough anymore. You have to follow it with action. You have to actively encourage feedback and ideas in group and individual settings, and you need to accept all points of view on an issue, even those you don’t agree with.
“One thing employees know they’ll always get out of my brother and I is a good ear for listening,” McMillin says. “But they’ll also get the sense that we support them and the people working for them. We’re not going to knock anyone’s head off for something they want to share with us. Beyond having an open-door policy, you need to be open-minded. Of course, we do want employees to deal with their direct supervisors first, but in the event they feel awkward doing that, they can come to us first if the situation warrants it.”
Maybe you can implement an idea or maybe it doesn’t fit. But you do owe it to your employees to give them feedback on what they’re proposing, and do it before the employee’s enthusiasm for the idea dries up.
“Maybe the idea isn’t totally embraced or acted upon, but maybe there are parts and pieces that can be used,” McMillin says. “You need to figure out where the root of the suggestion is coming from. Is it going to benefit their personal agenda, the project or the company? That can play a role in whether you can implement the suggestion or not.”
