Business people are busy today – very busy. That has always been true, but more so now in the face of a distressed economy. Companies are struggling to maintain profitability, the components of which reside in every part of the organization – from maintaining good client/customer relations, to wringing maximum productivity and efficiency from production, to cutting expenses to the bone.
For the senior people, these pressures are compounded. They carry the weight of the company on their shoulders. You’re doing them a favor when you can relieve them of some of their burdens. So the suggestion that senior managers become better communicators is often met with incredulity and outright rejection.
Yet focusing a bit more on communicating with one’s employees can actually help bring some of the relief and support that is so critical in such trying times. A true story helps illustrate this.
A few years ago, a process industry company engaged us in an employee communications assignment. This company owned several large facilities around the world. The plant where my story takes place was quite large and consisted of multiple parallel processes, all doing pretty much the same thing round the clock. Like other such plants, a machine manager and his team of managers and supervisors run each component operation, covering the various facets of keeping that machine going.
The manager of one machine in this plant told me this story and I’ve never forgotten it.
He was in his mid-50s. One day, he went in for his annual check-up and his doctor told him that he needed to get more exercise, and suggested a long walk each day would be a good start.
This plant is built with the offices at one end, and an executive parking lot right outside. So this machine manager every day would walk about 50 or 100 feet between his car and his office. To follow his doctor’s orders, he decided instead to park his car at the opposite end of his plant, forcing himself to walk about a half-mile both morning and night. Aside from getting more exercise, he realized some unexpected but very important benefits.
He suddenly had a lot more daily interaction with the people working on his machine than ever before. Sometimes it was a simple wave or nod and a "good morning" or "good night." Other times, it was talking about the latest NFL football game or the coming hunting season.
The important thing is that he broke the ice. Over time, he also changed people’s perceptions of who he was and what he did. He became more human and more approachable in their eyes. And what happened eventually is that people increasingly felt comfortable coming to him on the floor with problems, ideas, insights and solutions. Though that hadn’t been his intention, he opened lines of communication that had never existed before, in turn building trust among the work force.
His machine was one of the older machines in the company, yet about a year after he began his daily walks through the plant, his operation’s performance rose markedly – so high in fact that it became the most productive and efficient operation in the company.
What happened? What role did communications play in making this production line suddenly so productive? I think you know the answer, or at least can guess.
As this manager told me, as his people came to feel more comfortable with him, they told him things about his equipment and operation that he hadn’t fully appreciated before. And when he engaged in a little give-and-take with these hands-on operators, they had ideas and insights that, as the guy in charge, he could and did act on.
Sitting in that remote office, buried in reports, emails and meetings, managers don’t get a lot of opportunity to get their hands dirty, so to speak, learning what makes their operations tick. So the lesson here is, create the opportunity. Get out and talk to people. Pretend your doctor told you do it. You may be surprised what you learn.
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