Be available
Henze and her team were having trouble articulating the competitive advantages that Verizon Wireless had over its competitors. She and her team talked to some front-line employees at retail stores and found those employees could articulate very crisply and succinctly what they saw as competitive advantages.
She took the ideas, shared them with directors and formed a cross-functional small group of the employees. They drafted in their own words what they saw as the company’s competitive advantages in Houston, and those words were adopted nationally.
Without getting out and talking with employees, Henze and her team might still be looking for the best way to summarize the company’s competitive advantages.
“The more that you are out there, the more comfortable they become,” she says. “So, it’s not a big event, or it’s not a big deal that Kay just walked in my store.”
Making yourself available for employees and customers is key to being a great leader, but unfortunately, it is sometimes easier said than done.
“At the end of the day, you have to remember that you control your own calendar,” Henze says. “For me, that is really the biggest piece of it. I schedule time to be in front of my customers and in front of my employees all the time.”
Henze spends time with business customers and business sales representatives and tries to make announced and unannounced visits in retail stores once a week.
“You have to schedule it,” she says. “Through the years, if you set a goal that you’re just going to do it and don’t have the discipline around it, like any goal, it never really occurs.”
Don’t overdo it, though.
Scheduling visits once a week instead of once a day is much more realistic to achieve, and gives you time to work on problems or ideas you are hearing when you are out and about.
“I can’t think of a time that I haven’t spent time with our employees or our customers that it hasn’t resulted in work that needed to be done,” she says. “You have to allow yourself the time to go do that work. Because, otherwise, the employees lose faith.”
When making the rounds, be aware that you will run into all different types of employees. From the overachieving to the disinterested, you have to gauge the temperature of the room and be ready to interact with everyone you meet.
“Sometimes you’ll find an employee who is disgruntled and just doesn’t want to necessarily share for the betterment of themselves or the company,” she says. “Sometimes you’ll find an employee who feels, for whatever reason, that it’s inappropriate to share directly with a president as opposed to following the chain of command. Sometimes you’ll find, unfortunately, an employee who simply doesn’t care. You hate that, but it’s reality.”
When Henze runs into employees who feel uncomfortable going outside the chain of command, she will ask other people to step in.
“I might ask one of the HR consultants to go to the store and see if they are more willing to open up to HR, which sometimes they are and sometimes they’re not,” she says.
“But it’s always a sign to me, and I always just try to use other resources to get to what exactly is going on.”
A pitfall of being an engaged and available leader is the reality that you may undermine your managers. If you are making the rounds and speaking with your managers’ direct reports and employees, you could create a situation where a manager feels like you are micromanaging him or her or interfering with his or her leadership style.
To avoid that situation, Henze will give a new director some insight into what she does on trips.
“When I have a new director come into my organization, the first time that I go to visit their locations or work with their managers, I do it with that director,” she says. “They can see for themselves what I’m looking for, the questions I am asking and I can give real-time feedback with them right there with me. I can point things out, and then I think you can build from there. The employees also see you together, which is very important.”
You also need to report back what you learned on the visits almost immediately. Henze’s first call she makes after a stop is to the director of the location she just visited.
“Feedback to the next level is always provided,” she says. “It’s always in the spirit of improving the business and making sure that our employees have a good level of morale, that we are putting our customers first and that we are working together across all the layers to improve. So, my managers, my directors, when I leave a store they are usually the first phone call I make and the response that I always get is, ‘Thank you for the feedback.’”
The call will also let your managers know that you aren’t going behind their backs or keeping information you learn on the visit a secret.
“There is no hidden agenda,” she says. “Everybody is on the same page and because of that, (it) filters throughout the entire organization. It’s very transparent.”
