Provide learning opportunities
The effort to teach employees has to start at the top. You need to take an active role in giving people chances to learn and coaching them to become more productive workers.
Perlman has found success by engaging employees in troubleshooting missions. He’ll assign a similar task to two or three individuals at different levels in the company and see how they handle it.
“I can tell an operations person and a store sales executive both to go out and build a table shopping the competition on what they are doing for delivery charges,” Perlman says.
“You get these different protocols back and then you figure out what’s the real right way of doing things. The key is you have to challenge people now and then and allow them to come back to you to ask questions when necessary.”
The idea is to get employees to open their minds about a specific issue and put their own skills and talents to use to find a solution rather than passively relying on your direction.
“If you take a 25-year-old and say, ‘Here’s your job and here’s how you do it,’ he gets bored,” Perlman says. “You take a 25-year-old guy and say, ‘Here’s your job and this is how we want the end result to look like. Why don’t you do it how you want to do it and then we’ll discuss if your way is better or worse than the normal way.’ If you challenge people, you can really drive creativity.”
Perlman says your ability to read people will help you be better able to tap into that creativity.
“If I come out with a new concept, I’ll say, ‘Does anybody have an opinion, good, bad or indifferent?’” Perlman says. “‘Does everybody agree with this? If you don’t agree, tell us what your issues are.’ If everybody is sitting there, giving you that blank stare, that’s not good. If they are sitting up in their seat and looking up at you, that’s a good thing. Reading people is very important and if you’re not good at it, start playing poker. Even if you lose a little money, you’ll make out in the long run.”
It’s through this constant communication that you will develop a fluid list of ideas to toss out to your people for consideration.
“They’ll tell you where the problems are and what the customers are saying,” Perlman says. “It can sometimes involve just asking people, ‘This is how we do this, this is how we’ve been doing it, what would you do differently?’”
When you get an answer that seems to make sense, listen to it.
“Most people tend to not listen to the people who they have assigned various tasks,” Perlman says. “The larger you get, the more you have to delegate. In turn, you then have to really listen to what your people tell you.”
