I’m from the camp: If your company is not growing, it ** by definition ** is dead. You just haven’t been pronounced dead yet!
Change management is a critical skill every CEO must have in there tool kit. Inviting change in an organization you founded is different than walking in the door as a new CEO, with a turnaround plan in your briefcase. The later was the case at Web Associates and Starbase where I was recruited by the BOD with a mandate to get the companies on a road to profitability, immediately. Failure would mean bankruptcy for the company, loss of jobs for all the employees and a zero return on investment for the people who invested real money to get these companies going.
Now, I want to step back a second and say that the process of change is constantly going on within any good company and the processes I am going to talk about should be a part of any good manager’s regular routine. During times of major change, such as a major company turnaround, these skills are even more critical. You can use MBWA as a tool after you have announced a major change to walk around and find out how the employees perceive the announced change. Are they supportive and excited about it or are they reluctant and feel that it is going to cause them more work and thus fight the change that was just announced.
You must realize that change can and should happen from both the top down and from the bottom up. Here I will discuss some ideas for soliciting change from the bottoms up.
You’ll never know exactly what is going on in the company if you spend your days in meetings, on the phone or in your office staring at your computer. In addition, change won’t happen simply because you ask for it. If change is not embraced by the employees of the company, it will fail, meaning you will fail. I see it time and time again, a turnaround CEO comes in and 2 years later is shown the door with little evidence he/she was ever there but maybe a new marketing plan. Change was not embraced by those within the comany and the most common reason for failure was that the employees were never engaged in the change process or asked to take part in the company's turnaround.
Here is the strategy I used:
Change Management By Walking Around (MBWA)
I scheduled time in the morning and afternoon where I would get out of my office and go walk around and talk to my employees, mixing up when I would wonder around. I planned my walk around time so I would hit each department before I started over making sure I didn't just hang out in one or two departments. I would introduce myself as if they didn’t know me and I would take some time to find something out about them. Things like how long they had been with the company and why they picked this company to work. I thought of it as fishing. Random questions with no right/wrong answers just to get a feel for what people were thinking and hopefully to allow them a little time to relax and be him or herself. I would always finish the conversation with, “Tell me about what programs or processes are going well and why?” and then “What changes can we make that would improve the way we do things?” I always asked both questions to better understand what was going well in the organization from their perspective as well as what they felt needed to be fixed.
Now I must admit, I had a lot of people respond with, “Huh?” They thought it was a trick question or couldn’t believe that their CEO was asking them their opinion. 99% of the time they just said, “Nothing.” and I moved on to the next department. I had a lot of people tell me they never met the CEO before. When my allotted time was up for the morning or afternoon I would go back to my office and write down all of my notes from walking around. I would check people off the organization chart and think about any comments made to me. The first couple of weeks people were in shock or scared when I came around because this was a new process and they had a lot of apprehension about what was happening and can they trust me if they were truly honest. I knew trust was a two-way street and that I had to earn their trust as well. I was committed to giving this process some time to work.
I got feedback from my management team that people we’re talking. “I was different.” That is a big first step with introducing change; people need to know “something is different.” As people would tell me about problems they had doing their job, it gave me a chance to work with my management team to engage them to solve these problems. I got to assess my direct reports, figure out their strengths and weaknesses and also coach them to be better leaders. By teaching them, I was changing them and the organization was changing.
Asking employees about what is working and what is not is a double edged sword. If they tell you something that is not working and you do nothing, how likely are they to tell you something the next time you are in the area, not very. This is why it is important that you follow up with employees on what you heard and what changes you are willing to support or not support and why. This at least tells the employees that you heard them and are willing to change, or that you heard them but for a specific reason this problem will not be addressed now because…….
People started talking about the changes and now when I walked the halls people would get out of their chairs to say hello to me. Employees stopped hiding the truth and started telling me what was really going on. Now I had the information I need to work on improving processes, communication and identify where more training was needed.
When you have offices around the globe like Starbase Corp, you must manage your time when you’re visiting the office in order to walk around and talk with employees. They know you’re there and if you fly in, attend a meeting and fly out without a single “hello” you are sending the wrong message. I seldom popped in/out of a remote location. If I did, I would just send a note to all the staff in that remote office usually telling them why my visit would be a short one. Unless I was firing someone in person, I told them I was there to work on a process or problem and was on a tight flight schedule. The fact is, these people know what the problems are before you do, so trying to hide or dodge them is a joke and they’ll be the first one to say so behind your back.
When I visited one remote office the staff had told me the previous CEO had only visited once, when they purchased the company four years ago and had never been back. However he came to their city every time the Lakers were in town. They felt like unloved step-children which resulted in an office that just did the minimum to get by.
Also, when you go to visit a remote office invite one of your direct reports who has never been to that office and take them with you. Let them walk around while you do your meetings. I guarantee you’ll have something to talk about on the flight back! In addition, when that office calls them about a problem they will be more engaged in getting it solved.
If you haven’t walked around lately, get it on your schedule. Even if it’s just every other day or once a week, get out and do it on a regular basis. Encourage your direct staff to do it and to send you and the other direct reports a short write-up on what they found and what, if any, actions they are going to take or assistance they need. After you do, leave me a comment and tell me if you noticed any difference.
Eat Your Lunch In The Break Room.
If you’re going to have lunch at the office, eat in the break room. Sit next to someone you don’t know. If you see someone getting ready to each lunch at their desk, ask them to join you in the break room. Same goes for breaks. Know when people take breaks and hit the break room at the same time. And please, if you have an executive coffee room, don’t use it every day, go where your people are. If you 
spend every minute, break and lunch with your direct reports, you’ll never get the pulse of the company.
Once a month I would actually invite people to lunch. I usually invited 5 people at a time and no, we did not go to the conference (executive dinning) room to eat. I took them off site, usually some place we could walk to. I like to mix the group up with people from different departments when I could. I’m not against taking people from one department if I really needed to get them to open up about what is holding back progress in their team. However in these situations you usually need to have your direct report with you, which is why I like to mix it up and leave the direct report off the invite. Plus I like to see the dynamics of how people interact with each other over a meal. There is something about “breaking bread” that gets people to open up.
I require each of my direct reports to have lunch with someone in their department each month. Again, I would prefer they were not their direct reports and if possible, “skip a level”. I would ask them to email me a summary of how lunch went. I’m interested in how the employee responded to the manager’s question, “Is there anything I can help you with today?”
All Hands Meetings.
These are meetings with the entire company in attendance. I held them each quarter. I would give them my report on the health of the company, and then I would give each of my direct reports a couple of minutes to report how their department did. We had a small set of metrics that measured the health of our business and I wanted all employees to know these metrics, how they were measured and how they contributed to them, Then we opened it up to Q&A. We also allowed people to submit questions via 3x5 cards. It’s a candid session and not all of my answers are popular. My policy is to be honest and truthful with my responses and always made sure to let people know what I expecting of them.
Often in dysfunctional organization they need to be reminded what good performance/behavior looks like. I remember having one heated debate in front of 200 employees about the importance of getting to work on time and that I expected people to be at work by 8:30am. We had some people showing up whenever and leaving whenever feeling if they just got their 40 hours in each week, all was good. The fact no one could ever count on anyone being at their desk at any specific time didn’t seem inconsiderate to them even though the rest of the workforce had no idea when a co-worker was going to be at work each day. Again, if the company was healthy, productive and profitable I can be as open as the next CEO. But when it’s on life support holding on for dear life, the turnaround CEO must focus on process improvement, structure, goals and accountability. Culture comes later.
All Hands Meetings can be held with multiple offices. I like to move around and have difference offices “Host” the All Hands Meeting by having all my direct reports go with me to the office who is hosting. You can use conference calling and streaming video to get everyone involved. It’s affordable if you plan and execute it correctly. Make it a priority to be accountable to your employees every 90 days and they will in turn, be accountable to you. Tell them your goals, what you hit, what you missed and why. Ask them to do the same. They will respect you for it. Most companies have never had an All Hands Meeting. Please leave me a comment and let me know if your company has them and if so, how often.
Use of Social Media Technology
Take a look at your company Intranet and see if you’re keeping up with tools to empower your employees to share their ideas and comments with you. You and each of your direct reports should write a 
monthly blog where you discuss important, relevant items to help improve the company or department. Allow people to comment anonymously to these blog entries. If people do comment make sure you reply to some of the comments personally. Don’t have your admin do it! People need to know you read your own blog!
Create messages forums for each department, add polls and surveys and ask questions. Be bold, ask questions like: “What changes are not working?” and “What are we doing right?” You can do other things as well like allow employees to comment on your Products, Services, Marketing Materials and Press Releases. Create the tools where they can voice their views. I would tell employees it doesn’t bother me if you want to stand around the water cooler and bitch about Management as long as you’ve written to management and voiced your complaint first. Set the expectation and give them the tools to communicate with you. If you do that and do something about their complaints, the water cooler will never have a crowd.
Thanks for reading.
....Jim