Listen to your workers. I know
that there are many different
opinions about what the major
services are that the YMCA
could provide. I’m not the only
person who comes to the table with an agenda or opinion.
Until you can see where
another person or group is
coming from, it’s awfully hard
to just come in and set your
own agenda or opinion without
first knowing where other people are coming from.
There will be times when we
come to meetings with a preset
agenda, but when we’re in session where we’re trying to discover things about the organization, we’ll try to start the meeting by asking people what they’d
like to accomplish during that
time. We chart that, then hopefully by the end of that meeting,
we’ll go back through that list
and see if people had their goals
met in terms of the meeting.
I try to have face-to-face communication with larger groups,
groups of employees. But if people ask for one-on-one meetings,
I really try to make myself
accessible to volunteers and
staff. I try to make enough contact on a regular basis with
employee groups so they can
hear my thoughts and the priorities of the organization.
If you do that on a regular
basis, it really has a way of cutting down on individual meetings. I have 12 branches of the
YMCA of Greater Indianapolis
that I try to work with, and I try
to put myself in front of those
employee groups on a regular
enough basis, and I’ve found
that requires fewer one-on-one
meetings.
I have those meetings on at
least a quarterly basis. Sometimes that doesn’t have to be a
staff meeting. It can be a special event or something where most
of the staff groups are assembled. I try to deliver a lot of the
same messages time and time
again, making sure the priorities
of the organization are said
enough times so that people not
only hear them but internalize
them.
It’s a lot about buy-in. If
you’ve had a chance to express
thoughts and opinions, the likelihood of you walking out of
the door with people on board
is higher. As a team member,
you don’t always have to have
your way, but you always hope
to have your say.
Don’t forget the priorities of the
organization. I personally need to
remind myself of my own priorities. If I need it, I know the rest
of the staff needs it, as well.
I’ve been in organizations
before where we almost had to
beg the leader to tell us what
the priorities of the organization
are. You can really starve for
that as an employee if the leader
isn’t letting you know.
What happens if you don’t
communicate that is you end up
with people determining their
own set of priorities. Because
people are so differently talented in different ways, people
gravitate toward the things they
enjoy the most.
But those things don’t always
line up with the things in the
organization that need to be priorities. And sometimes, priorities change, sometimes on a
month-to-month basis, but certainly on a year-to-year basis.
HOW TO REACH: YMCA of Greater Indianapolis, (317) 266-9622 or www.indyymca.org
