Listen before you speak
Engaged employees are employees who will want to offer their opinions and feedback on what you and your management team
are doing in order to improve the organization. All it takes is giving them opportunities for feedback.
Every time Jones interacts with his employees, whether it’s on the job, at a meeting or a chance encounter in the hallway, he makes it
a point to listen before he speaks.
“That’s the first thing I do when I meet with someone,” he says. “I do a lot of listening before I even start offering opinions. As leaders,
we have to realize that there are a lot of things we say that employees couldn’t care less about. It may be important to us, but it’s not as
important to them. So it starts with listening and talking around the topic of strategy. That’s what brings us together.”
It takes a level of discipline to listen before talking. It takes even more discipline as a leader to be willing to say that you don’t have all
the answers. It’s a quality that comes with experience and practice and a willingness to adhere to an employee-first philosophy.
“Developing that discipline is where the true art of leadership comes in,” Jones says. “I always tell employees that there is really nothing major that happens in my office. The most important things we do happen at the bedside of the patient each day, and I’m personally not there.
“So I have to let the people who work at the bedside know that I appreciate what goes on there, and that plays in to being a good listener. Part of being a good listener is that you have to be prepared to say that you don’t know, and you have to be willing to ask for help
when you don’t know the answer to a question. Those are powerful words that a leader can use: ‘Tell me what I need to do. Explain how
I can better support you so that we can accomplish our mission.’”
As the leader of your organization, you probably want to feel like
you’re ultimately the one in control of everything that occurs
under your roof. You are accountable, but your employees do most
of the groundwork and likely have more influence than you over
your company’s processes and the final product you show to
clients and customers. It’s a key reason why you need to sincerely
listen to and value their input.
“If they don’t understand how important they are to you, they’ll
wonder why they’re following you,” Jones says. “But if they understand how important they are to the organization, then when you
ask them questions, they answer from a completely different perspective. If you set yourself up to be a great leader with all the
answers, when you ask them for their input, it’s not understood.
But if you ask for their input and sincerely mean it, you create that
connection factor with employees. Then they really know that
their ideas and insights matter.”
Implement ideas
Listening is only half the battle when building a culture of
empowerment. If you listen to employees’ feedback and ideas,
then you do not allow them to implement their ideas, the effect
is as damaging as not allowing employees to reach you in the
first place.
Employees have to help the organization reach its goals. But
Jones wants his employees to take ownership in their ideas by
developing their own plans for implementation.
As with listening before speaking, it takes discipline to let
employees take the reins on a project that could have a wide-ranging effect on the whole business. But effective delegation
is a must for any successful leader.
“I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older that your way is not always
the best way,” Jones says. “You have to be prepared to let people succeed and fail with their ideas. Obviously, you can’t fail
on a regular basis, but allowing that learning experience is part
of being a leader.
“If you think someone really has a bad plan or if somebody is
learning through an experience and you feel you have something to add, you let them know that upfront. You ask them to
prepare something, then sit down and talk about it. If you have
developed the right relationship with that person, they’ll come
to you if they’re struggling and ask for help.”
To ensure that new ideas are created and implemented with
a common focus, the managers of each project put performance standards in place. The standards vary according to each
project, but they give Jones and his leadership team a way to
measure how the initial idea is growing and if it’s growing
toward an overall organizational goal.
“You basically say that these are the performance standards
— we agree upon those, we put it in the performance
appraisals together, we signed off on it, and I will help support
you in accomplishing this,” Jones says. “Again, it gets down to
that connection factor, do they really know that you know
what is important? Do they really know that they’re dealing
with an individual in the leadership role who wants to have a
working relationship with them?”
If there is a breakdown in communication, if ideas aren’t finding their way from employees to decision-makers, the first
place you should look is at yourself. Engagement of employees
starts with the people at the top of an organization. If you
aren’t communicating with enough vigilance, problems will
begin surfacing farther down the ladder.
“If we’re not accomplishing our strategies and people aren’t
progressing, it starts with me,” Jones says. “What do I have to
do differently? If the organization isn’t meeting the objectives
that were set, any leader should turn inside and ask themselves
what they should be doing differently.”
When possible, play to your strength in communicating.
Effective communication from the top of the company means better ideas and feedback flowing upward to management.
“You have to decide what your strength is in communication,” he
says. “If it’s one on one, you need to use that. You have to recognize that versus if you’re a prolific writer and can write a great
motivational piece.
“But the key thing I try to do is say that I’m just like everybody else. I try to be as open-book and self-effacing as possible. That in and of itself will open the avenue to communication. But you have to play to your strengths. When it comes to
engaging employees, always ask yourself, ‘How do I communicate best?’”
HOW TO REACH: Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center, (713) 242-3000 or
www.memorialhermann.org
