When there is garbage, I take it out, when the phone rings, pick it up… How can I (as the leader of our company) expect to have team members who “get things done” and have a “whatever it takes” mentality, when I set limitations on what I (as the “CEO”) will/won’t do?
If the phone is ringing and I don’t pick it up, how can I look at someone else and say…why don’t you ever answer the phone? If there is garbage around (which annoys me to no end), but I don’t take it out, what right do I have to ask others to do the same?
I think as a leader in any organization you can’t be above doing “whatever it takes” to move your organization forward. Look at this txt from Zappos CEO:
Which leads me to some serious lessons I learned over the last few months.
I have no idea how people in this day and age have “offices” separate from their team, but that is a rant for another day.
In the weeks and months as our old office space, got crunched and crunched, and the team squeezed closer together, and my somewhat larger, offset cube was dismantled to make space for a printer and more desks, I started to realize the value of proximity.
As we ran out of space, new people were placed where my old larger cube used to sit, since we had nowhere to put them. Doing that helped me learn a lot about myself and my team.
Here goes…
#1: People learned our values quickly.
By sitting near me, our newest team members got to hear how I made decisions about why we are firing a client, or how we are spending money, or how I let people run with their ideas, I hope they got a feel for who this company is and what we believe in, and how we got here, in a VERY real way. They’ve heard conversations that were hard for me to have with parters, clients, etc. They got to hear how I handle a client who might be disappoionted and a client who is thrilled with our work. I hope they take that time when we were so close as a primer for what the heart and soul of this company is all about.
#2: Processes got WAY improved.
Any company with leaders, senior account members, account members, and newbies inevitably has work pushing down the food chain, so something might come from me, I might meet with my account team, they don’t shoot any holes through the idea and then it get passed down to our newbies to execute. The newbies are anxious to help, but over time they start realizing that some of this stuff just doesn’t work.
Sitting close to our newbies resulted in several big changes at SEER, the biggest one was highlighted by Allie, who had been with us for only 3-4 months at the time. Her insights resulted in how our entire SEO team is organized. We changed the organizational structure of our team (it had been this way for 6+ years) based on a recommendation from a recent college graduate who had been with us for 3 months.
LESSON here: Newbies bring perspective, encourage them to speak up!!
How did I give them the platform to speak up?? I made time…
I sat with our newest team members and asked, “tell me the parts of the job you like the least."
I was told about all kinds of tasks that were important but not very challenging, and I want to keep people challenged damn it! So I asked the newest team members to provide solutions and they did, some things stayed, some things were outsourced with our oversight, some tasks were just removed, and some were completely revamped. I would never have had this spark, if I wasn’t sitting close enough to say, wait a sec, I need to get a grasp on what people are tasking you with. As a result, people are more challenged, clients get better results, and everyone is happier!
#3: We failed quicker.
Sitting near the folks executing on tasks helps you to extinguish bad ideas, or outsource low level tasks more easily. Very often your new team members want to show your senior team members that they are eager, wiling to hustle, and are talented.
As such they rarely push back even on tasks they think might not be valuable. Sitting near our newbies allowed me to overhear bad ideas that they might have spent hours on just to get nothing for our clients from that time investment.
I was able to ask our account managers to explain how doing that task was going to help our clients hit their goals…sometimes I got shaky answers…so I’d probe until I was convinced or the task-giver realized they had some more homework to do before putting someone on this task or it was clear that this task would help us hit client objectives.
I’d save the new team member from wasting their time on an idea that wouldn’t have helped clients achieve their goals. They also were relived to not have to do a task that deep down they felt was not a good use of time. This allowed me to let the team know, its OK to ask that question yourself, its OK to push back a bit and make sure there is a good reason to be investing our time in a task. Other tasks I would hear people being asked to do, I thought…wait we can send that out to someone its just data aggregation and not strategy. But obviously new team members aren’t going to know that we would rather pay someone to execute that task or build a tool to do the data aggregation. That lets them work more on strategy, which they love.
#4: I got to check in with everyone.
In that same vein, the printers got moved right next to my cube…talk about traffic…my god! My little desk was sandwiched between 3 conference rooms and a printer. YUCK. But I learned something about every person that went to that printer, I got to find out how their day was, what they were struggling with, and what they’ve accomplished. Why? Things take a while to print out. So while they were standing there it gave me an opportunity to catch up, even if for only 30 seconds.
#5: I connected with them more personally.
I got to learn more about our newest people, got to learn about their previous jobs, why they left, why they chose SEER, about their brothers and sisters spread out all over the country, their favorite football teams, etc etc. Knowing the people in your organization at a more intimate level is on of my core beliefs. I don’t ever want nameless / faceless people, ever.
For the record, I’ve never been a corner office guy but our old setup had me kind of off to the side at a larger cube instead of right in the pit with the team.