Communicate the change
The next step in AGCO’s strategy change was rolling it out to the
rest of the organization.
“The people on the front end — those are
the guys that implement the change,” he
says. “I can do nothing, so that means my
job is to manage the people that generate
results. I have to reach those guys; therefore, it’s very important to have a bottom-up approach.”
A lot of leaders may think the lower
employees aren’t as capable or may make
more mistakes, but Richenhagen takes a
different approach.
“People create problems, but also, people
fix problems,” he says. “So if the majority
of your people have the capability to fix
problems instead of creating new problems, then you have to take the time to talk
to your people and the time to walk your
factories and talk to your employees and to
meet with your employees.
“Communicate in a straightforward and
simple way,” Richenhagen says. “Very
often, people talk too much, and their messages get, by far, too complicated, complex
and sophisticated. I came back from a
management conference at Harvard, and I
was on the panel, and there were some
other CEOs. When you’re asked a simple
question and it takes you 20 minutes to
answer, you can be sure that after maybe
five minutes, you lost 80 percent of your
audience.”
He says people often speak to demonstrate how important they are or how much
experience they have, so they get lost in
details. Instead, focus on what’s most
important to achieve, and then double-check to see if they understand.
“Don’t do that by asking the question,
‘Any questions?’ or, ‘Did everybody understand?’” Richenhagen says. “When you ask
that question, nobody would say, ‘No, I didn’t,’ because it would disclose themselves
of not having paid attention or being too
stupid or being a bad listener or whatever.
“Your feedback has to be done in a more
intelligent way, so that means you have to
involve people in a little discussion, or you
have to allow for questions or comments
and open the discussion.”
One way he successfully did this was pre-arranging with people he knew to have
them ask questions if nobody spoke up.
“You just invite them, ‘Mr. So-and-So, I
see that you have a question. Why don’t
you ask it?’” he says.
This would open up the floor and make
employees comfortable speaking up so he
could address their questions and concerns and they would truly understood
what he said.
It took Richenhagen another three months of traveling, meetings and speaking to make
sure that all of his people truly understood
what he wanted to do, but when it was over,
he knew they were ready to move forward.