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Message for managers: Talk to your employees

By Guest contributors for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:August 9, 2009

Be it good or bad, your employees expect some feedback. If they get the information they will be motivated to give their best; in many cases they will give you even more.

How do you know that you are a good manager? And how can your subordinate workers know that they are good? Those two simple questions just look simple, but the answers are not so simple. Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind are the results. You can tell how good you are by measuring how much your revenues have grown, how big part of the market you have conquered, how many products managed to sell…

But those are just numbers. The are perfect method for a scientific application and you CFO, but they are not suitable for humans, and to be honest they are not suitable for CFO anymore. Although numbers can tell the story Homo sapiens need and emotional feedback. The most of us may know somewhere deep inside that we did a good job, but we need some sort of verbal confirmation. The humans need that. That’s why there are people in the company that are in charge for internal communication. However, sometimes you, the manager, are responsible for the lack of the communication and lack of excellent working results.

There are many ways that you can use to inform you subordinates, team members or colleagues. Some companies have internal newspaper, some relies on the intranet, and some of them use a combination of all means available. But the way is not so important. Some of us like to take a trip to Bali and enjoy a small village with virtually no people around, while some dream about 24 hour party in New York. No matter what you prefer more the important thing here for you is to satisfy your desire.

The same is true for your subordinates and co-workers. People from want to know what their company do on the market, how good it is, what are the short and long term goals, and what role they play in it. At the end, they want to know what the company expect from them. Employees want to be the part of the system that have sense because then they know that their work is meaningful. If they know their role and place in the organization, then the team is strong and it will give much more than randomly gathered group of individuals.

Here lies the danger. No matter how sophisticated communications channels are, they expect of the team leader to be the first source of information. If a company has some sort of papers or intranet it is easy for manager to think that that’s enough. They think that their duty is not to talk, but to work. That is wrong.

At the left, there is a division of internal communications and it tell that workers are important to the company. At the right, there is a boss the doesn’t speak. In the middle – we have unsatisfied employees. They don’t know any specific details about their work and they feel like they are not important. Their disappointment grows from day to day, the strength of the team weakens and that lead to bad performance. Add to that the situation where the boss is always on the meetings and looks busy, speaking nothing about those “important meeting”, and you don’t have the team anymore. You have a bunch of people that are not happy.

The cure for such complicated situation is very simple. The team leader must talk. She must tell what is good and what is not, what the team means for the company, and what they mean for the team. Be it good or bad, your employees expect some feedback, and if they get it they will know what to do. They will know what to improve if needed, and they will be proud when they are good. If they get the information they will know that they are important and they will be motivated to give their best; in many cases they will give you even more.

Thus, talk to you colleagues. Be it good or bad, tell them. Raise you voice, lower it, be polite, be firm, yell at them, let them yell at you… But just speak to them. You will create not good but excellent team that will raise your company above the competition. And what is even more important, you may find some good friends along the way.

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Stjepan Skramic, Co-founder of Histerius Design and Positions and Promotions

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