Tag Archives: communication

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How to Get the Pulse of Your Organization – Part II

Back in May 2014, I wrote a blog post entitled How to Get the Pulse of Your Organization. In this post I described two techniques that can be used to effectively communicate and lead your organization; “Did You Know” emails and a web based employee feedback system. In this week’s article, I will introduce two other techniques that I used to communicate and keep my finger on the organization’s pulse.

  1. Monthly lunch with the leader – Pick a random set of employees each month to have lunch with you. Do not repeat employees until everyone in the organization gets a turn. A group size of 10 to 20 works best. Use these lunches as open mic sessions for employees to ask you whatever questions they may have. Be open and honest with your answers and wherever possible tie the answers back to the organization’s vision, mission, values and goals. Above all else, listen intently to the feedback, take notes and never get defensive. These sessions are your opportunity to hear what your organization is thinking and talking about. If the conversation starts out slowly, you can prompt discussion by asking questions like;
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How Do Leaders Get Their Organizations From Vision to Action?

“Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, Encourage the Heart”  Kouzes and Posner

 

I attended the annual CII conference in July this year and was really impressed with the quality of the presentations and tools that were offered. Construction Industry Institute, CII, was initiated by the University of Texas and is a collaboration between academia and industry to research some of the tough issues that industry faces and to come up with practical approaches and tools to deal with these problems.

Every year, CII selects a number of these tough problems and creates research teams comprised of academia (professors and grad students), representatives from owners, construction companies, engineering firms and suppliers to research these problems and come up with potential solutions. Each team has 2 years to do its research and to compile the results along with tools or guidelines to help address the problem identified.

Every year, CII holds its annual conference and the research teams report out their findings to the conference attendees. I would highly recommend membership in CII to anyone that is involved in engineering or construction.

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What Knowledge Workers Need To Know About Meetings

“Meetings are the factory floor for knowledge workers.” Dick Axelrod

There are probably hundreds of articles floating through the web “demonizing” meetings, depicting the majority of meetings to be unproductive and a complete waste of time and money. Having worked in the engineering services business for years and, through this experience relying heavily on meetings for team alignment, collaboration, innovation and production, I have never agreed with these articles. So, when I saw this quote from Mr. Axelrod I was very curious to understand his side of the story.

His philosophy is basically that meetings are where a lot of work gets done or should get done in today’s organizations. Because of the complexity of business today and the interaction that is needed between so many different components of a business (internal and external to the business), people must meet face to face or virtually in order to have alignment in the business. Now, not all meetings are run properly so not all meetings are productive (see the Tripp Crosby youtube video for an example ). Axelrod goes on to provide a solid model and methodology for running meetings that are focused and productive. See his book Let’s Stop Meeting Like This: Tools to Save Time and Get More Done (BK Business) for more details.

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Here Is A Method That Is Helping Businesses Get Alignment On Organizational Values

A few weeks ago in the blog post “What Does Your Organization Value?” I wrote about what organizational values are and why they are important. I explained that the leaders of an organization must not just communicate organizational values but they must also model the values that they are communicating.

If they model something other than what they are communicating, their staff will pick up on it immediately. Employees emulate the values that their leaders are modeling, not necessarily what they are stating. Hence the Ralph Waldo Emerson statement “Your actions speak so loudly I cannot hear what you say.”

In the article, I suggested that leaders conduct a poll of their employees to find out what the employees perceive as the organizational values. I believe that this is an extremely important exercise that an organizations’ leaders should do every few years.

So, how should you go about this in your organization?

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Did Your Organization’s Vision Leak?

Last week I posted an article on organizational vision entitled “What Is Your Company’s Vision and Why Should You Care?” Besides defining what a vision statement is and providing some examples, I stated that an organization’s vision must be “clearly articulated, consistently modeled and communicated”.

Why does the organizational vision have to be clearly articulated, consistently modeled and communicated? Because vision leaks!

I first heard the “vision leaks” phrase during a leadership training class led by Andy Stanley and then I noticed it was included as axiom number 13 in Bill Hybels’ book Axiom. I am not sure where it originated from but it is an extremely important concept for business leaders.