Give and welcome feedback
When it comes to building a winning culture, you have to keep the lines of communication open so you can get a better feel for what is working and what isn’t.
Beauchamp wants to hear feedback from all parts of the company, and that includes those who are closest to the customers. Employees have his phone number and his e-mail address so they can contact him.
But opening up those lines of communication can lead to you receiving calls and e-mails for problems that should be handled by someone else. It can also create an atmosphere where managers and directors feel uncomfortable if their direct reports aren’t respecting the chain of command.
You have to be clear about the guidelines for employees contacting you with ideas or information.
“What I look for is if an employee has any feedback they want to give me about direction of the company; things that they wish I would do as a CEO or maybe they can give me some input that would be helpful around what customers are saying and what employees are saying,” he says. “Just let them know there is a feedback loop directly to me that’s wide open all the time. You do have to use some caution when you explain that to not say, ‘I’m also the person if you don’t think your raise was big enough, to call me.’”
In addition, he doesn’t want to hear about insignificant information like the soap being low in one bathroom. However, if it’s low in all the bathrooms, then that is something he wants to know.
Opening up the feedback lines will make it easier for you to hear problems like this.
“If we were letting our campus run down and the soap was needed to be refilled in all the bathrooms, then, yes, someone ought to tell me,” he says.
“One of the things a CEO has to do is watch little things to make sure that the organization knows that there is a standard of quality and everyone is accountable to it. If I see something like a typo or a poorly worded sentence that goes out in the e-mail to a large number of employees, I will get involved in that.”
What seems like a small mistake to someone can get bigger and bigger if that person doesn’t receive feedback.
“The reason I do that is not so much that I think I’m going to write a better e-mail,” he says. “It’s just that I want the organization to know that you better be very professional and precise in how we communicate. Little mistakes to a lot of people can have a cultural impact on the organization.
“So, when a CEO particularly in a group setting, finds small errors and points them out in front of the group, it sends a message that we need to pay attention to detail. The organization needs to not get sloppy.”
Whether you are the CEO of a company or a young intern, you need feedback to know how you are performing at your job.
“It’s a frequent mistake, and it’s one that I know we’ve made before where someone is essentially told that you’re doing a good job and then all of a sudden, one day, you are doing a bad job,” he says. “People don’t like that. People want to know, ‘How am I doing?’”
However, if you are going to point out mistakes, you have to be ready to get that medicine yourself. Tell your direct reports that you want to hear from them if you are doing something incorrectly. When you hear your weaknesses, you can’t argue with them or get defensive if you are asking for that feedback.
“The hardest part of our job is the things you don’t know about yourself,” he says. “It’s not the things you know you need to get better at. It’s the things that you don’t even know you need to get better at. It’s the blind spots that are the real risk.”
How to reach: BMC Software Inc., (800) 841-2031 or www.bmc.com
