Technology is a wonderful
thing, says Greg Dell’Omo.
Technology has made communication more efficient and able
to reach an extremely wide audience in seconds. And electronic
communication mediums, such
as e-mail, would seem to be
the perfect invention for time-challenged business leaders.
But it comes with a catch,
says the president of Robert
Morris University: Technology
can make communication a little too easy.
When you start using your
computer as an easy way out,
as a substitute for getting out
among your employees and the
people you serve, technology
starts getting in the way of your
leadership.
Dell’Omo says you can’t neglect the personal interaction that
makes your employees feel valued. Any time you can spend
walking the halls of your building, talking to employees about
everything from the future
direction of the company to the
brand of coffee in the break
room, is time well spent.
Smart Business spoke with
Dell’Omo about how he involves
his employees at Robert Morris
University — which posted
2007 revenue of $89 million —
through active engagement.
Let them see your face. We all
like personal contact.
Technology is a wonderful
thing, it has allowed us to
communicate very effectively
to a wider audience, but people still like to have that oneon-one connection.
They like to know they are
an individual, not just another
person on the other end of a
computer screen. In addition,
you can’t beat face-to-face
communication in terms of its
personal aspects, the ability to
read body language, the ability
to understand, ask questions,
deal with it right away.
We all know e-mail communications can be very misleading at times and can even create misunderstandings. E-mail
is easy and omnipresent — [it
is] there all the time. People
can rely too much on it.
The way people communicate on e-mail is not always
what they intend. The way
they write a sentence or structure a response, they might
send a very different meaning
than what they intended. It
might sound more harsh or
flippant than it was meant to
be, it might appear overly
defensive.
A lot of times, the communicator never intended that, but
that’s the way it is coming
across in written form. So
you have to be very careful
about that. We talk a lot
about that with my senior
management team, balancing
e-mail communication with
as much face-to-face communication as possible.
Put your feet on the ground and
walk. Communication gets a lot
more challenging when you
starting talking about communicating below the senior management level. We’re a midsized
university, we have about 5,000
students and about 600 employees, so it’s a struggle to communicate with all different levels.
That’s where technology
comes into play with e-mails,
but you don’t want to rely solely on that because, again, it
can kind of become sort of de-personalized. You really want
to balance it, be efficient, get
the word out, but making sure
that your communication is
fairly personal and one on one.
I just try to walk around the
university whenever possible.
It’s important to try and be as
visible as possible.
Making the time for that is
the challenge. You have to
build it into your schedule if
you want to take an hour or
two, hit a certain part of the
campus, making sure you run
into a certain number of people, that you attend a number
of functions on campus, just
touching base with a lot of
people on a one-on-one basis.
