David Ricker believes that
good leaders stay in touch.
And in order to stay in touch,
you need to stay visible.
That’s been one of Ricker’s
guiding principles as founder,
president and CEO of Broadlane
Inc., a 650-employee company
that provides business solutions
for the health care industry.
A connected CEO keeps
everyone around him — customers and employees alike —
connected. And for Ricker, staying connected means attending
countless meetings, logging air
miles, walking the halls at headquarters — whatever it takes to
show everyone at Broadlane
that he is engaged.
“When I say I’m visible, I
mean visible with my employees, visible with customers and
visible with our suppliers,”
Ricker says. “I make myself visible by being in front of a lot of
our employees during meetings
at different levels within the
organization.”
Smart Business spoke with
Ricker about how to keep
everyone connected to your
company by being visible.
Get to the point. You have to be
very clear and very concise,
and you need to keep your
messages fairly simple. I’ve
observed leaders in the past
where it’s very intriguing to
hear what they have to say, but
oftentimes, it’s not very clear.
It doesn’t resonate through all
of your various constituencies.
My view is that simplicity,
clarity and a redundant message are very important.
Obviously there are lots of
leaders that have different
styles, and some view that
being vague and ambiguous is
an appropriate position to take.
I don’t happen to support that.
Get your leaders on the same page.
I’m very conscious of surrounding myself with senior
leaders in the company who
feel very empowered to move
and execute on our strategy
without my everyday, direct
involvement.
As an example, my COO conducts many meetings on the
operations side that I don’t
attend, and I don’t need to
attend, because it would be
redundant for me to do so. He’s
executing things that we’ve
agreed to on a high level.
We’ve come to terms on
what our strategy is, what our
execution and time frames are,
and so on. I’m not much of a
micromanager, but I do look
for leaders in the company
that have the confidence and
can productively use an
empowered model to free up
my time to be more visible.
