Encourage feedback. I tell everyone in my organization to come talk to me about anything you want. Just do it in a professional, nonattacking, nonthreatening manner. If you do that, I’ll listen to anything you have to say.
You can be argumentative with me as long as it’s done tactfully and professionally. You can tell me that you think I’m not moving in the right direction, express why you think it’s wrong. We’ll have a conversation about it, and if you have an influential message and can sway me to some degree, I’ll accept that. If not, we’ll maybe agree to disagree or I’ll sway you.
You have to allow people the opportunity to have their say. If you give people the opportunity to get stuff out in the open, it cuts down on rumors and it cuts down on back-door conversation. It ultimately cuts down on people getting distracted. If the things on your employees’ minds don’t involve how they can be successful and how to better serve the customer, if they’re focusing on how they felt they were treated incorrectly, you’re not getting the best performance out of them. So you have to be willing to let people share things and you have to be willing to listen to some criticism. Sometimes you learn something from the criticism.
Stay close to the ground. Some-times leaders get too far away from where the rubber meets the road in the business, sometimes feedback has to go through so many layers that it can’t reach you. So it’s critical to get that firsthand feedback from your people that are down the ladder, doing the tactical jobs. You really can learn a lot from them.
Keeping feedback channels open has been a big challenge. There is no one model that I have been able to uncover that says, ‘This is what you do.’ It’s a matter of making sure you keep yourself tied to what is going on in the organization. You have to have very consistent and formal communication with regard to what is happening inside your business and in your distributed markets.
We try to spend a lot of time and focus on how we get that information up to the executive level, so that as executives, we really understand what is happening.
Be willing to adjust. You make adjustments by constantly looking at how things are performing and executing in the business. If you see something not making progress or trending in the right direction, you’re evaluating what the root cause is. If it’s something we can control or something we initiated, we go back and adjust.
Maybe you picked the wrong person for a role, someone who is not following through, you have coached them and worked with them, and you just need to accept that they are the wrong person in the wrong role. If there are tools and systems that got implemented incorrectly, you need the commitment of resources to correct those. The tweaking is that you’re constantly looking at whether you have the right people in the right roles — are they executing and trending correctly? Do you have the right environment for them to be successful? If not, you make the appropriate changes.
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