Archive for the ‘Communication’ Category
Using Your People to Help Make Decisions
Get your people involved
Good management practice is to get your people involved. Use them to help make decisions. This makes a lot of sense. It is impossible to know everything about all things. Use their expertise, get their input.
Don’t be a politician
The problem today is there is also the tendency for managers to be to be very political. Managers ask for input when they have already made decisions to give illusion that they are interested in what their employees have to say. People are not stupid, they will figure out you are only talking to them as window dressing. What this leads to is people not really investing when you really want their input and simply dissatisfied employees.
Leadership is knowing when to ask
Leadership is understanding when to ask employees their input and when to just make the decision. When you have a new group, that does not have the experience needed to give the needed input, then by all means make the call. If time dictates a decision must be made now, then by all means make the decision.
Tell employees about decision
The key when making decisions, without input, is to then quickly get back to your employees and let them know what is going on. The worst thing that can happen is your employees get information, about the decision, second hand. The information may be incomplete or false, leading to bad decisions by employees. When there is no information people will fill the vacuum with their own information. Made up information almost always creates an even bigger problem. If you find you are always making the decision, then you need to reevaluate how you make decisions, because it means your planning process is flawed.
Don’t abdicate the decision
Once you have asked your team their input, remember you are still the boss and it is your decision. Do not abdicate just because your people do not agree with your position. Just make sure to let people know you heard what they had to say, repeat what they are telling you. Then tell them you appreciate their input, but this time you do not agree. However, if you are always overruling your team, my guess is you are not really listening and you are really a politician.
Management By Wandering Around (MBWA)
Is the idea of management by wandering around (MBWA), first presented in 1982 by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman in their book, In Search of Excellence, still a valid concept? Today we have so much more data and information at our fingertips through internal and external sources. Can we find everything we need right at our desks? Yes, you can find the baseline information. But no, you cannot make the best decisions for the organization. Without real world experiential data you lack the information necessary to get the real texture of what is going on in the business.
Without texture or context you have only half the answer. It is like trying to make a decision on buying a car without seeing it. You know it will take you down the highway, but will you be comfortable with the trip.
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Working With Inexperienced Employees
Everyone hires what they believe to be qualified employees. We spend hours creating elaborate job descriptions, listing all the qualifications needed to get the job done. We spend hours crafting the best interview questions for the interview process. Then we advertise for candidates from the best apprentice programs, technical schools, junior colleges, colleges, universities, and competitors. We may even pay to have each potential employee tested, so we know as much as we can about the individual, to make the best hiring decision possible.
The organization make a hire. But then what? We may have a new employee orientation program to get them up to speed about the organization. Orientation programs can only go so far. We then put the new person on the job and promptly ignore them and wonder why the person isn’t working out as we hoped.
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More… Simple Communication
We meet people everyday and it is as your mother probably said, “You only get one time to make a good first impression.” People being the way they are, if not given enough information, will fill in the blanks and then form an opinion. In most cases it is real simple things that can help you make a good impression, especially if you are the boss.
If you are the boss or a person at a higher level the simplest thing you can do is make sure you tell the person your name. I have seen it happen many times. The underling get introduced and the person at the higher level is cordial, but they do not introduce themselves. Simply say, hi I’m Bill Smith not Mr. Smith, not, Ms. Jones, not Dr. Murphy, etc. Simply, “High I’m Bill Smith.
The person will probably say, “I know who you are,” but if you don’t the person is more than likely to think, “He thinks he is so important that I am supposed to know who he is.” It is a small distinction, but a big one. If you want your organization to see themselves as a team, act like you are a part of the team.
Leadership?
What is leadership? If you go to Dictionary.com and look at the definition of leadership you recognize very quickly that to understand what leadership is you must understand what it means to lead. Dictionary.com takes a combined fifty stabs at defining lead as a verb and noun. To list a few as a verb it defines lead as to go before or with to show the way; to conduct by holding and guiding; to influence or induce; to guide in direction, course, action, opinion, etc.; to command or direct. As a noun lead means the first or foremost place; position in advance of others; a person or thing that leads.
What does it mean to be a leader?
In simple terms, to define what it means to lead, we could use the old Calvin Coolidge adage, “The buck stops here.” The key is not just understanding what it takes to lead, but how it is accomplished. It means sometimes leaders are going to make decisions that are not popular. For example, today, if we look into politics, leadership is starting to mean do what the latest poles show us. Maybe in a political sense this is okay because politicians are supposed to be representing the people. However, this assumes that a pole will show what is better for the greater good rather than the poled population.
Crisis Communication
Every business will end up in a situation where the business will be in a crisis that affects the organization publicly. The crisis the business faces could be a recall of a product you make, a recall of a product you sell, or an indiscretion by an employee to name a few. The key, like any business situation is to be prepared to communicate to all your constituencies. The worse thing that can happen is fail to communicate and alienate customers, suppliers, or employees.
Don’t let the public fill the company’s communication gaps
The simple truth is the organization needs to take control of the situation to insure the correct information and enough appropriate information gets to the public. If you do not communicate the information, the public will fill in the gaps for good or bad. If you have a good reputation, people will tend to give you the benefit for a while, but that will not last. Ask any prominent politician that has run into problems. Most of the time people will forgive some transgressions, but when the “spin” gets too heavy people revolt. If your organization does not have a strong reputation the crisis can kill the business.
Simple Communication
We interact with people everyday in overt and very subtle ways. A person’s view of another is very often based on very little information. As humans if we do not know something about another we will usually just “fill in the blanks” so to speak. What we don’t know we simply just make up.