Trust, acknowledge and monitor
employee decisions. You must
keep an open mind. You have
to understand there are multiple ways to accomplish a task.
I really believe strongly in
allowing employees to take their direction to accomplish
that task. It’s more of a
hands-off type of management approach.
I allow the managers of
each department to run their
department. I don’t really get
involved, but I will meet with
the managers to discuss
what is going on in the
department. If I have any
input, then I will discuss it
directly with the manager
and try to improve on something, or, if I feel it is something that is very, very important or needs to really have a
point made.
A lot of times, it’s a positive
— something you are trying
to get across that is a positive situation — and so we
will get the whole department together, and I’ll give them my opinion or my feedback on something. It helps
boost morale when something good happens to be
able to get everyone together
and say, ‘Hey guys, this was
great. We did a great job with
this. I really appreciate how
we handled it.’
I really feel like that if
someone believes strongly in
what they are trying to
accomplish — and there are
10 right ways to get to the
same outcome — it may not
be the path that I would take,
but I look at it and say, ‘Well,
they are on a path where they
are 100 percent confident
that they are going to get to
that outcome. Let them go.’
Let them get to that outcome in a reasonable amount of time. But, if you
see it deterring away from
the outcome we need, maybe
give a little input to push
them back in the right direction or just kind of assist
them with what they are trying to accomplish. But there
are times where you do have
to step in and say, ‘Well, I
know what you’re doing. I
agree with it, but we need to
get there a little bit faster.
Could you maybe try to take
this approach?’ In a friendly
way, try to lead them on a
different approach.
Learn from your mistakes. Failure
is not an option. Continue to
find a way to prevent it from
happening. Strive to change
your approach with an open
mind before failure happens.
If you are working on something and it’s heading down
the path of failure, stop and
re-evaluate the entire situation and try to come up with
a different approach that
would get you the outcome
you need.
With all that said, being a
realist, failure does happen.
When failure does happen,
you need to understand why
it happened. You need to
learn from it, and you need
to implement new procedures to prevent it from happening again.
Once you’ve fully analyzed
how it happened and have
implemented something to
prevent it from happening
again, you just have to move
on from it.
HOW TO REACH: WDG Construction Inc., (813) 907-3440 or www.wdgdevelopers.com