Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation by Bryant Adam
Author:Bryant, Adam [Bryant, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2014-01-07T00:00:00+00:00
10.
SURFACING PROBLEMS
As a consultant, I learned that you really have to listen to the lowest-level people in a company, because that’s where the answers are.
—KEN REES, CEO of Think Finance
One of the greatest challenges for leaders, whose jobs are inevitably isolating, is to find out what’s really going on in their companies. After all, people generally want to bring them only good news: “Two thumbs up, boss, everything’s great!” How do you get employees to be candid with you about what’s happening on the front lines? For leaders, this is part of the endless challenge of creating a corporate culture where feedback is encouraged in all directions. In chapter 6, CEOs discussed the importance of having “adult conversations” to give employees feedback. In this chapter, they describe their strategies for getting feedback—about how they can do a better job leading, and about any problems deep inside their organizations.
Dennis Crowley of Foursquare will ask his employees over coffee how he can do a better job.
“As the company has grown, I can sometimes start to feel disconnected, and I’ll decide to randomly meet with one person a day, and we’ll go out for a half-hour coffee,” he said. “You do that for six weeks or so, and then all the channels of communication are open again. People feel like they can come and talk to me. I learn about the things that are troubling them or challenging them, or questions they might have. I always ask them for feedback, too. ‘Is there anything that I can do better to make your job easier?’ ‘Is there anything I can do to make the company better?’”
Ivar Kroghrud of Questback has told his employees that he considers part of his role to be the company’s “chief ironing officer,” which encourages them to speak up about how he can smooth out processes so they can do their jobs better.
“It’s very easy in a fast-growing company and fast-changing industry to get hung up on all the things that aren’t working and that we should be fixing,” he said. “If you want to get extraordinary results, you have to play to people’s strengths and you have to help them work as close to plan as possible. If you allow them to get bogged down in all the problems that are out there—and there are always problems—then they’ll be unproductive.
“You can get a lot of speed by thinking of yourself as a chief ironing officer. Once you have a successful system in place, you can spend some of your time just walking around talking to people and asking, ‘What’s preventing you from doing an even better job? What are you spending time on that you don’t feel you should be spending time on?’ Those kinds of questions are easy to ask and people relate to them.”
Ken Rees, the CEO of Think Finance, a firm that develops financial products, instituted regular meetings called Cookies with Ken for employees at all levels.
“As a consultant, I learned that you really have to
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