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Spreading the word
How to make communication with employees a two-way street
By Erik Cassano
Smart Business Dallas | December 2008
Page 1 of 2
Jim Rose
chairman and CEO, Mosaic Sales Solutions
Jim Rose doesn’t back away
from the spotlight. He can’t afford to.
As the chairman and CEO of
Mosaic Sales Solutions — a
$200 million company that
offers marketing and branding
services for businesses —
Rose knows that his employees
analyze every word he says
about the business, picking
apart his words for layers of
meaning.
Rose says that every CEO is
in a similar position when it
comes to communication, so
you need to be as upfront and
accessible with your employees
as possible because without
informed employees, you are
missing a crucial building block
for your business.
“When I was in graduate
school, we had CEOs come in
as guest speakers,” Rose says.
“We’d ask them where they
spent their time. I always
thought they’d say things like
production, finance, books and
all that. But they said people,
and it’s true.”
Smart Business spoke with
Rose about how to communicate and enable employees and
why leaders who don’t communicate are leaders who lose out.
Stay consistent. You have to have
integrity in what you say, and
embedded in that word is consistency. People are very smart,
even at the lowest levels of the
organization.
They listen to what you say,
but more importantly, they
respond to how you behave and
what you do. They’ll look to see
if you’re doing what you said
you’d do.
Openness is a second key
piece. Sometimes, there is bad
news, things you don’t want to
discuss. But you still need to get
that out on the table. That is
really important.
The last important key is frequency. You can’t just have a
once-a-year meeting and then go
hide in your office. Communication needs to have some level
of frequency to it. It’s not a production schedule, like every third
Thursday, I’m going to do this.
But I definitely cycle through.
In our Canada office, I want to
be up there if I haven’t been up
there in five weeks. So it’s not
something that’s hard and fast,
but it’s the awareness that I
want to cover a lot of people
over a period of time, and I need
to work that into my framework.
Getting the mission and strategy delivered is through people.
People are a huge piece of what
you do. I’d say 85 to 90 percent
of my time is spent with people
in some capacity, be it a small
group meeting, walking the
halls, groups sessions, client
strategy sessions. It’s a probably
the No. 1 thing, because without
people, answers don’t flow and
customer satisfaction doesn’t
flow. So it is my No. 1 thing. It’s
not a matter of going by the
watercooler in my spare time.
It’s front and center to what I do.
In my job, I don’t do much, as
strange as that might sound. I’m
not a doer of tasks; I’m a doer of
culture and of strategy, of mission and vision. The kind of
things I do are very intangible.
Solicit feedback. In all our employee events, whether they be town
halls, coffee talks or whatnot, we
always solicit feedback. The
thing I use almost every meeting, I go around and ask if there
is anything else, anything they
want to contribute, so I give them
a chance to have the final say.
They may have a clarification,
they might have a rebuttal, they
might have another idea. I’m
always seeking feedback because
of my openness and communication. I also don’t put people in
trouble if they challenge ideas
or the status quo. I very much
say I don’t know everything.
As the leader, you have views
and perspectives on things, but
you don’t know everything. The
people closer to the action are
more in the trenches and can
give you that different view and
perspective.
