Get other opinions. When we have any kind of project or even a process change, we get people involved.
One of my failures at this recently was I decided I wanted to be really green. So I sent an e-mail to my IT guy and said, ‘I want you to change all the copiers to automatically print on both sides.’ That’s the default. So if you don’t want it to print on both sides you actually have to click and change that you don’t want it to print on both sides. So he did that because I’m the CEO. I said, ‘Do it,’ and he did it.
Well, the uproar was huge because I didn’t think about the fact that when we get a chair order, it prints up what we call a pick ticket. That goes to the floor so they know what to build and that stays with the chair the whole time it’s being manufactured. Now you have two orders on one piece of paper. Invoices were printing front and back.
So it’s just one of those things I made a decision in a vacuum. I didn’t talk to anybody and caused complete upheaval.
(I learned) that I don’t know it all and that there are a lot of processes and procedures that happen now that I’m just not in that everyday part of the process. I made this change in vacuum without talking to anybody else and screwed stuff up. Within 30 minutes, we changed it all back. You really have to be a consensus builder with your organization.
Create an open culture. You really have to have complete trust. Your people have to trust you, and you have to trust them. As soon as you start second-guessing, then you go back to the nontrust situation and you’re not going to get there. For us, it started out with just me and my mom. As we added people, they became more like just a big, extended family. So it’s easier if you start that way than if you go into a situation where now you don’t have a great culture and you have to change.
It’s hard when people don’t trust you to earn their trust again. Most people walk in the door thinking, ‘This is good and my boss is good.’ It’s how you treat them and then they change their mind and say, ‘Maybe my boss isn’t so good. So maybe I don’t need to be quite as loyal.’ So I think that culture is a very hard thing to change. One person can upset that culture in amazing ways. Over the years, we’ve tried really hard to get rid of those bad apples as fast as possible.
What we’ve found out is that you get rid of one attitude and then another bad attitude kind of rises to the top. They’ve had a bad attitude for a while, but they weren’t as bad as the other one that you just got rid of. Sometimes it takes awhile to weed out those people, but it doesn’t matter how valuable you think that person is. If they are ruining the day of other people and you do nothing about it, then you are taking full responsibility for having a crappy environment.
How to reach: Neutral Posture Inc., (800) 446-3746 or www.neutralposture.com
