Fix It: Getting Accountability Right by Roger Connors & Tom Smith

Author:Roger Connors & Tom Smith [Connors, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Asking the last person to come into the organization for feedback is a brilliant way to extract input from those new enough to not have developed biases and blind spots, yet long enough on the job to know what’s going on.

Have an Open Door

A man we’ll call “Blake” was a new site vice president at a major food manufacturing facility, and he recognized that he was working in a culture where no one felt as if management wanted to hear what people really thought. He was especially concerned about solving quality issues on the manufacturing line, but he wasn’t getting the open dialogue he needed from frontline workers. He wanted them to know they could come to him to share their concerns, that his door was always open. Blake decided he needed to send a strong message that he was dead serious about hearing what he needed to hear. Perhaps he would need to do something different, maybe even shocking, something to grab his people’s attention and send a clear message. Blake showed up to work one morning with a drill and duct tape (not your typical messaging tools!). He then set about removing his office door from the hinges. Moments later he was duct-taping his door to the cafeteria wall, with his nameplate still on it! The message: Blake has an open-door policy. Hard to miss that one. The result: feedback flourished. Dialogue that had never happened before started happening. Our advice is to find a way to let people know you are serious about an open-door policy.

Plug into the Pulse of the Organization

Don Vinci, senior vice president of human resources and chief diversity officer for electric power production company Entergy, holds regular small group and team meetings of no more than fifteen people to plug directly into important feedback. His only rule: Those in attendance can’t be his direct reports. Taking this approach enables Don to get feedback from people many levels below him. He purposefully goes into the meeting without an agenda. Don made it clear to us that these are not meetings where people put together a laundry list of things for him to fix, but rather forums aimed at soliciting discussion, providing back-and-forth feedback, and establishing mutual understanding. We encourage this kind of joint feedback session because it greatly extends your understanding of what is going on in the organization without the overly rigid and restrictive chain of command that can get in the way of people telling you what they really think.

Make Real-Time Feedback an Important Data Point

Robert Martinez, sales manager for a California CBS/Telemundo/CW network affiliate, told us that feedback around sales targets is so key to his teams that the company generates a daily electronic report card first thing every day. “Having this kind of immediate feedback shows us the delta between where we are and where we need to be. There’s no guesswork. We practice feedback on steroids around here. It comes in electronically bold and bright every day. It’s hard

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