Direct and monitor
As much as Dysert wants to give freedom to his managers and his employees in the planning process, he still has to give them direction and monitor their progress.
About three months before the plans are due, Dysert and his vice presidents have a planning session on who’s going to research different aspects of the plan. It’s there that he can give them a nudge in the direction he wants them to go.
“I just don’t sort of surprise them at the end and tell them that I don’t like the plan,” he says. “Three months beforehand, I start to plant some seeds. I don’t tell them how to do it; I try to articulate sort of a vision where I think they need to head.
“It’s not giving them the plan. They need to think for themselves. But, it’s giving them sort of the CEO perspective on how things have gone and, directionally, do we need to steer the ship slightly left or slightly right.”
The vice presidents start to develop plans and they start to get feedback from the next level of managers about developing their individual plans. He then can get updates once or twice a month from the vice presidents about how the process is going.
“Informally along the way, they come back to me and say, ‘Hey, we had a good meeting yesterday,’ or, ‘Man, everybody is down. They can’t figure out how we’re going to do this,’ or, ‘This just seems unrealistic,’” Dysert says.
When you are having these discussions, you can adjust based on the new information that you now have. When the final plan is due, you don’t want people’s ideas coming from left field and having no chance of success when they present their ideas to the executive managers.
“It’s an informal way of aligning our thinking along the way so that we’re not getting into a two-day report out session where people are presenting just what I think are ridiculous ideas,” he says. “Or, I’m not standing firm with what they think is a ridiculous goal.
“We’ve done some sort of calibrating along the way so that when we have the plan together there, we’re not as likely to say, ‘This is totally wrong. Go redo it.’”
Dysert bases his involvement in various aspects of the planning process on the experience and capability level of the staff members involved and the risk associated with their task.
If someone is involved in a process for the first time, he will do a lot more coaching than if he or she is more experienced.
On the extreme end, if it’s an activity that can put the entire company’s financial well-being at risk and it’s in an area with a manager whom he doesn’t have a lot of experience with, then he will micromanage.
“I try to back off as much as I can because the more involved a CEO is, the more a CEO says, ‘This is where we need to go,’ people will go that way just because the CEO said it,” he says. “As opposed to a CEO saying, ‘Well, these are the areas I want you to research and I want you to come to the conclusion yourself.’ You are giving them the leeway to think for themselves.”
While checking in once or twice a month, or maybe more frequently, might keep you busy, it will save you time down the road.”
“It can be time-consuming, but if you don’t have that planning process, you can waste a lot more time backtracking and trying to figure why you didn’t accomplish your goals or why things aren’t going as well as you hoped.”
How to reach: Chromalox Inc., (412) 967-3800 or www.chromalox.com
