Check the pulse
Whether you’re new to a company like Bish or just keeping your finger on the pulse of yours, change starts with communication.
In his first two months as CEO, Bish traveled across the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific to meet employees and hear their perspectives. It’s more than a feel-good move when you ask them why the company is in its current state and what potential solutions they see. In reality, you need their input to help you understand the company and decide how to change it.
For that exchange to happen, you need to create an open environment.
“I would begin the dialogue with reintroducing myself to the group, talking a little bit about my background, sharing about what I was going to be doing in the first few months and also beginning to share some of my personal observations about what I had seen so far,” Bish says. “And then open it up to dialogue.
“[It was] asking people for their opinions about what was working, what wasn’t. Questioning some of their assumptions about the business and their views of the marketplace. Just having a very open, honest, frank, candid conversation about some of my perceptions, their perceptions.”
But those were big questions, especially for a reluctant audience. Bish began noticing something at these meetings — a signal that he needed to do more to engage employees.
“I usually point it out to the audience that nobody likes to sit in the front of the room,” he says. “And when I open things to questions, there are very few questions and people are always hesitant to ask them. Most people tend to be a little reserved and shy, particularly when they’re interacting with somebody in a position of authority. Sometimes, you really have to drag information out of them and assure them that it’s OK to be open and frank, that you’re not going to have an adverse reaction to something that they say that you don’t necessarily agree with.”
If it’s still quiet after that invitation, Bish throws out his own answers.
Because the basis of a conversation is give-and-take, you need to contribute. By then, Bish had already formed his own knowledge of what was going on — largely from his experience at Captiva. He also conducted additional research through DICOM’s published financial information and market data from various industry analysts, learning that revenue wasn’t growing and market share was dwindling.
“When I was standing up in front of a group and there was any kind of reluctance to talk, I would throw out some statistics from one of these industry analysts or refer to the financial data and tell people, ‘You know, here are my initial thoughts on why that might be happening. What do you think about that? Are these real issues?’” he says. “People are … not completely immune or blind to what’s going on in a company. Once you start that dialogue, they tend to all open up and come forward and engage in it because they see a lot of the things that you do.”
By approaching discussions as a peer of your employees — rather than an executive — you begin building trust and opening the flow of feedback.
“You have to talk to people, not at them,” Bish says. “When you do that in a peer-like manner as opposed to from a position of authority, the dialogue and the openness of people tends to develop pretty quickly and then they feel comfortable.”
