For Tim Westergren, the
epiphany came when he
realized how much time he was wasting in meetings
that could have been handled
without his input.
So the founder and chief
strategy officer of Pandora
Media Inc. began empowering
his 125 employees to make
decisions with the fewest number of people necessary.
“It’s contrary to the way a lot
of companies are run, where
there is a feeling that you’ve got
to get everybody involved in
every decision so people feel
included and so forth,” he says.
The strategy has created a
culture in which employees of
the personalized online radio
company establish strong
bonds with the small groups
they work with most often.
Smart Business spoke with
Westergren about how to
improve workplace efficiency
and how to implement a major
culture change at your company.
Q. How could another leader
create a culture like yours?
The first thing that I would do
is encourage the executive to
take his company’s leaders —
leaders I would define as anyone who manages a person —
and dedicate some time off-site.
Bring in some professionals and
spend some time on the interpersonal part of your company.
Get to know your people and
establish a different kind of
relationship between you and
your staff. It’s more personal
and more intimate and open.
Then, together, adopt this new
approach to make them part of
the process.
Then institute it and formalize
it within your organization so
that it becomes something that
every employee goes through.
Write it down together, and then
the leaders must lead by example.
Q. How do you get to know
your employees better?
There are professional management training folks whose
profession it is to take teams
and help them work together.
They have many different
methodologies for doing that,
but you typically go off-site
together, and they take the company through these various exercises where you
share your own perspectives. You reveal things
about yourself and you
do psychological and
emotional profiles together that help you understand each other and
how and why you interact together the way you
do.
It breaks down barriers
between people. It’s like
the equivalent of a managerial ropes course. You
all go off and you bond.
It’s a form of conversation that doesn’t happen
casually in the office. It
really has to be done and
moderated by an outside
person.
Most people have a very hard
time stepping out of themselves.
Everybody brings to these situations their own biases and their
own personalities. Very rarely
can you actually recognize that.
A professional is good at
doing that. And the nice thing
about that is they will do it
equally for the CEO as they will
for a director. They have no bias
one way or the other. That’s
really important because it creates a level playing field as you
start the exercise.
