Give a voice to your crew
Beyond trusting his people to do their everyday jobs with minimal
down-their-neck breathing, Goldstein believes that another big step in
getting your senior leaders on the same page is getting them to feel
like they have a voice in the path of the company.
“Even for senior leaders of a corporation, it’s not always easy to
voice your opinion,” he says. “Clearly one of the challenges that I
have, or that every president and CEO has, is to create an environment where your leaders are going to say what they have to
say.”
For Goldstein, the emphasis for creating an open culture for
senior leaders is to constantly think about how powerful they are
in the eyes of some.
“I have begun to appreciate the intensity of the impact on people
of what I say,” he says. “I’m not sure I fully appreciate it, but I have
told people over the years that if you’re in senior management, you
might think you are hitting somebody with a feather, but to them,
it feels like an anvil.”
No matter how welcoming you think you are, you have to realize that people are coming to you not just as a person but also as
a boss and the voice of the company — that gives every word you
use considerable weight.
“I really have to think about the words that I use,” Goldstein
says. “I would like to think that I’m a reasonably articulate person,
and I know that if I mean something to be constructive criticism,
there is, I would say, a very strong tendency of most people to forget about the constructive word and just remember the criticism.
So if I don’t really worry about what I’m saying and how I’m saying it, if I’m talking to a director or a manager or an analyst about
how they might do something differently, they are going to not
receive it well unless I go to very considerable lengths that they
would receive it well. And even still, there’s no guarantee.”
The thing to remember is that many people in your organization,
even among leadership, might not get a great deal of time with you.
So if all they hear is criticism, they are going to fear the worst.
“They will extrapolate from what I say to a whole range of situations past anything that I intended because if I speak to them one
or two or three times a year, then they may use those one or two
or three sound bites to decide how I feel about them in total — or
that what I chose to talk about was the only thing about their work
that I noticed,” Goldstein says.
To combat that, you have to create systems where people know
they are not thought of merely in terms of the constructive criticism you give them. Beyond thinking about how you phrase
something, take the time to point out to people that they are the
subject of many positive conversations or that you have high
hopes for them. Similar to the way a negative thought may resonate with them for months at a time, knowing you have positive
conversations about them will also dig its way into their brain.
“You have to try to create the conditions where they really will
perceive something as constructive suggestions to improve as well
as making people understand that I probably notice more and am
more aware of what they’re doing than what they think,” Goldstein
says. “So you try to create an environment in which people are OK
to accept commentary and act upon it.”
Once that environment is created, your people will feel better
about talking to you and be able to better internalize constructive
criticism. In turn, that will create those employees you want to go
out and start cascading your vision across your entire organization.”
HOW TO REACH: Royal Caribbean International, (305) 539-6000 or www.royalcaribbean.com
