Stay accessible. To get employees to take advantage of your open office door, they have to feel like they’re welcome versus it being a policy. The policy doesn’t work if they don’t feel like they’re welcome to do it — having them feel like they’re being heard, that they didn’t just waste their time, that they’re welcome to do it again. The second part of it is, if they have something you think is too trivial, you immediately say that you need to talk to so-and-so about that — ‘I’m not going to be involved in that decision.’ So you try and make them feel like it’s OK to tell me the idea, but it’s not your place to work with them on the idea. That’s somebody else’s place.
I’m constantly out of my office, talking to people about either areas I’m working on or areas they’re working on, reviewing how they’re doing something, what they’re doing, or the strategy that they’re working on. I spend a fair amount of my time, about half my time, working with people and not sitting behind a desk.
It’s more natural for me to communicate that way. I probably more naturally would go out, check in with somebody or talk with somebody than just solely rely on an e-mail. E-mails are great and I use them a lot, but it’s more natural to have a thought, get up and share it with somebody. My door is open for interruption, and everybody else’s door is open for interruption.
Stay focused on goals. That’s a much more difficult task in reality than it is on paper. We set our company goals as a management team, and then when we’re working on our reviews and goals for everyone else, we’re trying to incorporate some or all of those goals into our development plan for each individual each year, and then follow up on those plans to make sure that the goal was clear and the individual is working toward that goal to benefit the ultimate company goal. It is a very difficult task but one where you have to work through a lot of details in order to make it work.
Aligning goals means sitting down with the manager and the person reporting to that manager and the two discussing, very specifically, what the goals are for that individual. Then following up throughout the year on those goals to make sure they’re being achieved and work is being done to be successful at it.
The most important thing about a goal is that the person who has a goal agrees that it is an achievable goal for them. If they don’t agree to it, then they walk out of the room after having been given the goal, and say to themselves, ‘Are these people crazy or what?’ It’s having a goal where it’s aggressive, but the person understands how they can achieve it, and they agree that they can achieve it.
Finding a person’s ability to achieve a goal, that’s the responsibility of the managers to know and understand the capabilities of their people and know who can attain a little bit more aggressive goals than others. We do want the goals to be achievable; we just want them to be aggressive. The managers should know their people well enough where they can set goals that are achievable but still aggressive.
How to reach: SpeedFC Inc., (866) 377-3331 or www.speedfc.com
