Get the data. The first way to make sure you’re maintaining your course is by looking toward actual data. Once you find that data, then you try to validate what the data tells you through anecdotal evidence. Then, you see what others tell you. It’s amazing the wisdom you can get when you walk around the office.
If you want to know what’s really going on, you walk out into the workspace. You would be amazed at what you hear and see and what it can teach you about your business. You’ll be looking around and you will discover, ‘Gee, we’ve got a huge opportunity,’ or ‘Uh oh, we have a major problem.’ You can discover those things merely by listening to what others have to say.
It’s tough to maintain that kind of an open-door policy as a business grows. So you have to create forums for dialogue.
As we’ve grown, it has become harder and harder to do that. One thing we’re doing this year is I’m buying a lot more lunches. Somebody on the staff came up with the idea that we would have team lunches with the CEO. It is simply three or four people, and we all go out to lunch. I’ve found that with a couple lunches a week, you can get there. It gives people a chance to actually ask their questions.
Let your employees participate. Another thing we do that I’ve found effective is to have financial review meetings. We have a sign-up sheet once a quarter for these.
People who want to come look at the financials of the business can sit down in the conference room with us and we’ll go through the statements and answer questions. We talk about what we did right and wrong and why we are where we are. It’s participation — you need to let them in.
Employees believe that management and leadership operations occur in this giant amorphous black box. One of the things I encourage them to do is say, ‘How’d you make that decision? What were you thinking when you did that?’
Then I give them an honest answer. You say, ‘Well, I struggled with this; I considered that.’ And if it was the right decision, you say, ‘And it looks like it benefited us.’ If it was the wrong one, you say, ‘I got that one wrong.’
Encourage your employees to speak up. At first they are reluctant to share. Then you find through their questioning you get an enormous amount of wisdom. What happens is, people will start to connect the dots and say, ‘Oh, that’s why we do that that way.’ Yes, it is.
And as you’re going through that dialogue with them, you’ll get snippets of information like, ‘Oh, now that I understand that is the objective; in customer calls, we get a lot of calls that look like this. How would you answer that question of the customer?’ Then you’d say, ‘Interesting. Didn’t know we were getting those calls. Here’s an answer I might give.’
Two or three weeks later, you’re walking down the hall and someone says, ‘I tried that explanation you gave us the other day. The customer really got it, and as a result, they referred a client.’
How to reach: Entaire Global Cos. Inc., (800) 871-4442 or www.entaireglobal.com
