Collaborate
When Varel was a child and his mother caught him fighting
with his siblings, she didn’t just send him to his room or
make him sit in timeout. Instead, he had to do the unbearable — stand there — often with a bloody nose — hugging
his enemy sibling for 30 minutes.
Despite how much he hated it, it taught him to play nicely
with others, and that’s a lesson that helps him today as he
grows his company.
For example, Varel has an amazing employee who does the
work of three people — and does it well. The problem is the
person isn’t a team player and won’t communicate — he isn’t
playing nice in the corporate sandbox, and it’s burning
bridges with his co-workers.
That employee has to go because if you don’t take action,
people will see you putting up with an ego for the sake of
performance.
When other employees see this, it creates issues that prevent you from growing and moving forward.
“You see it in sports all the time,” he says. “There’s always
this maverick basketball or football player who’s got such a
strong ego that he’s the reason the team is successful. There
in lies a cancer for collaboration. Nobody wants to work
with him then … they don’t want to play nice in the same
sandbox. Sorry. This is the sandbox we’re in, and we all have
to play nice.”
In order to nurture more collaboration in your organization, you have to first get to know your people.
“Start off, No. 1, by being involved in every meeting and
session you could as a listener because you don’t know who
your people are,” Varel says. “You don’t know who the ego-maniacs are. You don’t know who the individuals are who
will be ‘me’ versus ‘team.’ You don’t know who has personal
agendas. You don’t know the personal phobias.”
Part of getting to know people happens outside of the conference room though. Varel calls each of his 400 employees
to wish them a happy birthday, but he also asks them other
questions, like how are things going, what they see right,
what they see wrong, why they like working at FusionStorm
and about their family.
“Ask the open-ended questions, and then shut up and listen
because your leaders will come to the surface,” he says.
The next step to fostering collaboration is to recognize the
laws of nature.
“When you have two individuals, you have two different
ideas already,” Varel says.
With this issue, remind people that their differences are
OK, but they need to work past them. Varel has a statement
on the wall that reads, “You can disagree emphatically in this
meeting, but when you get out of this room, you agree with
one another emphatically on execution.” For that to actually
happen, watch how people respond both verbally and physically.
“If someone shrugs their shoulders or nods their head, you
know they’re not 100 percent on board,” Varel says. “Then
you ask, ‘Are you sure? What else is bothering you?’ That’s all
you can do.”
While he’s been burned before, at least asking these questions on the front end creates more buy-in and collaboration
later.
“Open discussions prior to that are acceptable, but after that,
they’ve got to be agreeing and having each other’s backs, so to
speak,” he says. “Otherwise, empowerment will fail.”
