Build bridges
To bring a company together, you must communicate.
However, the most important aspect of communication does-n’t start with you. It starts with your employees.
Walsh says you need to find out what motivates your employees, what drives them to come to work each day and to try
their best.
She says you shouldn’t assume it’s a one-size-fits-all proposition. Personality, background, job type, all of it affects what
truly motivates each employee.
But Walsh goes even a step beyond that. She wants to know
what “excites” her employees about their work.
“As you work with your people, you get to see what makes
them excited every day,” she says. “For instance, most CEOs
are motivated by challenges. On the CEO ranks, there are a lot
of commonalities, but you really need to get to know your individual employees, understand what gets them motivated to do
their work.”
Just as a manufacturing company is composed of administrators, department heads, manual laborers and other employees whose job descriptions differ from department to department, a hospital has doctors, nurses, cooks, janitors, secretaries among its ranks. Getting to know different jobs, and the
people who fill those jobs, is a common denominator among
executives who seek to strengthen the relationships within
their companies.
Walsh says you need to be able to get on the same level with
each department by putting yourself, at least mentally, in the
place of the people who work there.
“You need to hit all levels within the organization,” she says.
“It’s important to understand what the more entry-level workers think, but it’s just as important to understand what those
more up the ladder think. In our case, what our nurses are
thinking, what our technicians are thinking, and it’s especially
essential to understand what our physicians are thinking and
feeling.
“Each employee has different priorities. Here, what is important to someone in the operating room is probably different
than for someone who is working in the intensive care unit versus someone who is working in the lab. Obviously, there is
always going to be some commonalities throughout departments, but each department, each unit of a business, will have
many of their own unique concerns and ideas.”
Drilling down to that level with your employees requires you
to go beyond simply noting that you have an open-door policy.
You need to get beyond the open-door policy, make personal
connections and give employees a reason to connect with you.
“Most employees would not feel comfortable walking into
the CEO’s office to let them know what might be happening on
their unit that particular day,” Walsh says. “The more visible
the leadership team is, the more approachable they are to
employees, the more likely employees are going to share with
them important information.
“Having an open-door policy is great, but it doesn’t take the
place of walking the halls and making sure the folks out there
on the front lines know that you truly do care about them and
do understand that you want to know what you can do to make
the workplace better.”