Q. How did you deal with the
challenge of transitioning from
monthly meetings to quarterly
meetings?
Again, I think this is where
you’ve got to get out. For
me, I find if you get out of
your office and go talk to
people — all the time I do
that, even within my office, in the different parts of the
business within my office,
twice a day.
I heard from them. They
were asking, ‘I really liked
the monthly updates. Getting
it through an e-mail doesn’t
necessarily give us a chance
to do Q and A. So, I took the
opportunity for the next
quarterly meeting to talk
about why we made that
transition. Again, and this
goes back to my thoughts
on, it’s not necessarily that
you’re doing it; it’s much more important to talk about
why you are doing things.
I just communicated that,
‘We are getting really big.
The ability to coordinate and take out the time every
month is impacting particularly our sales organization.’
Q. What is a pitfall to avoid
when trying to be a good communicator?
Disengaged leadership is
something everyone talks
about, but it’s really easy to
fall in to the pitfalls of just
staying in your office.
It seems so obvious, but you
can get bogged down in
reports and, ‘Hey, I need to
send this to our board,’ or, ‘I
need to fill out this,’ or, ‘I
need to do this analysis.’
There are only so many hours
in a given day where your
people are there and the business is really humming to get
to understand what are the
problems of the business. The
biggest pitfall is people staying in their office.
They don’t engage in their
different departments and
walk around and really hear
what the problems are and
talk to people who are perhaps two or three levels
below and engage them.
That is something that I’ve
heard from everyone that
works in my organization as
something that they really
like about my style.
I think it brings a real
understanding of problems.
So, when the problems come
to you, you don’t just throw
them out as, ‘Hey, that’s not
that big of a problem.’
You will have heard it and
already identified it. So, it
might be something that you,
again, discuss in the quarterly
actions. So, these things all fit
in to a nice plan and process
that can evolve over time.
HOW TO REACH: Navman Wireless North America, (847) 832-2367 or www.navmanwireless.com
