Talk to your team
As you start to figure out the vision piece to the puzzle, don’t do it alone.
“No matter what position you have in senior management, there needs to be at least one other person that you have value in their opinion,” Klipsch says. “Two people really do make more thoughtful and better decisions than any one of us could. Two people or three people ask other questions, generate other thoughts and bring in other things to consider. And after you complete that discussion, you end up making a more informed decision because you didn’t do it all by yourself. That’s true no matter what level manager you are.”
If you don’t feel like you have clear lines of communication in your business, Klipsch says you may want to start troubleshooting by looking in the mirror.
“If you do want an interactive management team where you do listen to people because you do respect their opinion, they have to believe you respect their opinion,” Klipsch says. “That selling job is up to the CEO. If you’re complaining that your team is weak, go look in the mirror.
“If his people are not prepared to say, ‘Hey boss, I disagree with that or let’s rethink that,’ if they are even hesitating doing that, then I promise you they are mo
re than hesitating. There are lots of things going on that they don’t agree with and the CEO’s style or what he said or how he said it has made it impossible for other people to feel like their recommendation makes any sense.”
If you don’t have a good relationship with your management team, pick the person on the team who you trust more than anyone else.
“Pick the person in the senior management team that you frankly have the most confidence in and the two of you start talking about what’s wrong with the entire management team,” Klipsch says. “Start with one person and try to build a team of two or three people. Maybe I replace somebody or maybe I replace one or two people. But you still have to be accountable for that team or you’re not the CEO.”
When it comes time to speak to the company as a whole, go in with your eyes wide open.
“Most employees in most companies know whether they are working for a company that has a management team that’s aware and is trying to do the things that need to be done or whether they have a management team that is ineffective,” Klipsch says. “There’s not an employee of any company today that doesn’t go home and wonder, ‘Could this economy be worse and could I lose my job?’ If anybody said they never have had that thought, whatever they are drinking, I’d like to have a drink of that.”
Once you’ve communicated the plan, it’s up to you to enforce accountability that the plan is adhered to.
“The thing that makes accountability work is reporting,” Klipsch says. “It’s clarity on whether the objectives are truly being accomplished in the time frame they were supposed to be accomplished.”
Klipsch is a big believer in a single piece of paper with four to six bullet points that clearly list the areas of responsibility for an individual.
“Let them expand on that from their perspective on what those mean and then agree about the writing,” Klipsch says. “Have a document written that both sides say, ‘I understand that, and I agree that’s what we want to do.’ It’s very focused on three or four topics and you make it clear what you are looking for and what time frame you want and the intended results you want. Then you’ve got to report on it at least monthly. There’s got to be a checkpoint each month that says, ‘I’m on track,’ or, ‘I’m not on track,’ ‘I have issues,’ or, ‘I don’t have issues.’”
So how do you make sure that managers stay current with the checkpoints?
“It starts at the top with the major corporate objectives and then drops down to lower-level departments to pick out the things they can do relative to the corporate objectives because not every department has a role in every corporate objective,” Klipsch says. “So department by department, by having a top-down approach, eventually what you’ve done is tied in the lower-level organizations in some support way for what that higher-level objective is.”
With a redesigned Web site debuting earlier this year and 35,000 members in its online forum, Klipsch is doing its best to weather the economic storm.
“There is no crystal-clear answer when you have the evolving and dynamic marketplace that you sell to where your customers change quite often,” Klipsch says. “It really is the senior management team’s responsibility to collectively ensure the vision and the financial model and the team that’s put in place in fact matches up to expectations.”
How to reach: Klipsch Group Inc., (800) 554-7724 or www.klipsch.com
