Encourage collaboration
When you create a company, it’s easy to think that you have
an answer for every problem. In addition to being untrue,
Brown says carrying that belief can chip away at the sense of
ownership that helps employees feel excited about what they
do.
One of the best ways to promote an environment of
energy and employee ownership is to avoid creating a
strict hierarchy of leadership in your company.
“A top-level manager never talks to a
bottom-level employee, certainly never
talks to an employee in another department, without the knowledge and consent of that employee’s manager,”
Brown says. “There are some organizations that are just amazingly rigid about
that sort of thing. It does create a mind-set that information has to flow only in
certain directions and in a very regimented fashion.”
That type of inflexibility can stifle the
kind of free collaboration that can take
place if those barriers do not exist. In
the instance of Interactive, where
Brown wants his employees to think of
solutions that his customers haven’t
thought of, such freedom of speech is
critical.
“It’s fairly common in the high-tech
industry for there to be ad hoc discussions that may involve people from lots of
different organizations and lots of different points in management hierarchy, and
you don’t get hung up in the titles and hierarchy as much,” Brown says.
There needs to be a structure in order for
a company to function properly. But the
key is to make it more about organizational structure and less about pecking order.
“You have to have a structure so you can
group people, but you don’t have to treat
it as a value chain,” Brown says.
Make sure the managers you bring in
have strong interpersonal skills, in addition to being adept at whatever department they are leading, to promote the collaboration even further.
“You can get in trouble very quickly if
you hire people as managers who just
want to supervise other people and who
really don’t have the technical skills themselves and aren’t contributing members
but are just managers,” Brown says.
“That way, they are able to maintain the
respect of their teams. They are also better able to assess the output of their team
members. That way, we can identify problems and identify people who are performing at a high level and make sure they
are recognized and rewarded.”
