Be honest with yourself
One of the most overlooked keys to successfully growing a company is creating a
good manager-employee relationship. If you
check the HR surveys, the No. 1 reason
employees leave a company or stay with a
company is their relationship with their boss.
“Companies live and die by how well relationships are managed inside the company,” he says.
“Yes, you have to have a smart idea and a
good product, and you have to support it
well and price it well. All of those things
have to happen, but it’s also true that a lot of
what prevents companies from executing
really well is all these people relationships.”
So, you want to make sure you have
enlightened managers who are not only self-aware but who really understand that part
of their job is making sure employees understand what they need to be doing on a dayto-day basis, helping them solve issues they
are confronting, and then helping them
manage their career going forward.
“As my organization has grown, that has
become more and more important to pay
attention to,” Tirado says. “You want people in the leadership/management positions with really good people skills — who
themselves are personally evolved.
“They know who they are, they know
how they come across, and they know
what kind of impact they have on people.
The larger and more complex the company,
the more people you have, the more organization that’s required, the more it requires
you to really understand who you are, what
your strengths and weaknesses are, and
really be able to form open and solid relationships with the people with whom you
need to count on to get things done.”
Good managers can be hard to find, especially ones who don’t mind taking a good
hard look in the mirror from time to time.
To determine whether a manager has the
skills to handle the delicate manager-employee relationship, Tirado created the
360-degree feedback program.
The idea behind the 360-degree program
is to present a 360-degree view of the subject. Tirado solicits feedback from the subject’s peers, subordinates and manager(s),
sends the results to an outside firm, which
summarizes them confidentially and sends
them back. The information contained in a
360-degree report gives an unbiased view
of what the subject’s colleagues think of
him or her.
“If you’re a fairly together and enlightened
person, typically your own self-perception is
consistent with other people’s perception,”
he says. “When I see that other people’s perception is highly different, that’s usually
problematic. It shows that you’re not aware
of how you’re coming across to people.”
Tirado’s work has paid off, and Silicon
Image’s vision of “Digital Content
Everywhere” is becoming clearer and clearer.
“That is what I point our employees to,”
he says. “Every day you work, you should
be doing something to fulfill that vision.
And if you’re not — go talk to your manager about how what you do every day is contributing to that.”
HOW TO REACH: Silicon Image Inc., (408) 616-4000 or
www.siliconimage.com
