Know what your employees do to help you better understand what they’re saying. You listen by understanding what they do. I believe that aside from a couple of the jobs in the office — I can’t program a computer — I could do most of the jobs at the company, and people understand that, so they’re comfortable talking to me about a problem.
You have to really know your business to be able to listen to criticism about the business because you realize then it’s constructive, not destructive.
Go and actually perform those jobs for a day and sit. For example, if you were to be at my office, most employees … have to sit in customer service for at least a day and listen.
They don’t have to answer the calls, but they have to sit and listen all day to what the customers think before they go into their job.
We’ve brought on two new senior VPs, and that’s where they start. The successful senior VPs have been the ones who have literally said, ‘OK, that’s great, but how did you get this? Where did you come up with this?’ Not, ‘OK, this looks like it reconciles.’
Make sure employees understand what you’re trying to communicate. You ask them — instead of saying, ‘So what did you think?’ because the answer is, ‘Oh yeah, I agree with you,’ — ‘Before you walk away, Suzie, what is your gut feeling? How do you think you’re going to implement this?’ Or you ask such open-ended questions as, ‘How would you apply what I just said?’
You can’t leave having done all the talking. You can learn Excel, but until you really do some Excel worksheets, you really can’t learn it. You can read all you want in the books, but you’ve got to go through two or three days of doing it to really learn it.
So if I’m doing and explaining how better to deal with customers, well, that’s great, but let’s put it in place, let’s have a role-playing between two employees.
We do a lot of training: ‘Hey everybody, come in, and in a particular area, let’s go through this example live. How would you do this? What do you think went wrong here?’ [That’s] rather than an e-mail: ‘Dear so and so, next time you need to do this.’
I like most learning environments to be question and answer, and I like for me to do most of the question asking. ‘Well, how would you handle that situation? What do you think could have been done differently?’
I think all of us have that school mentality of there’s only so much you can listen to; you’ve got to be able to do something creative with it.
How to reach: StarTex Power, (713) 357-2800 or www.startexpower.com
