Fast Lane
Making connections
How to help your employees help you
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Columbus | November 2009
Page 1 of 2
Dan Rooney, chairman, president and CEO, SCI Engineered Materials Inc.
If you ask Dan Rooney to tell you the last time he completely unplugged himself from his role as the leader of SCI Engineered Materials Inc., he’ll probably just start to laugh.
“I don’t think a CEO ever has a break,” says Rooney, who holds the title of chairman, president and CEO at SCI. “If you go away for a week or two weeks and shut off communication totally, there is such a pile of communications and e-mails waiting for you, you’ll just never get caught up.”
This doesn’t mean, however, that Rooney doesn’t trust his people at the manufacturing company, which has 25 employees and 2008 revenue of $9.6 million.
Smart Business spoke with Rooney about how to develop a sense of trust with your employees.
Q. What are some keys to reaching your people?
Have a fair amount of face contact with your direct management and management at least one level under you. I usually have a few prepared notes and some bullet points. I’m not a great person at speaking off a sheet of paper. That, for me, doesn’t work. For me, it’s bullet points and then talking to those bullet points.
When you talk to your people, take a fair number of questions. If I’m not getting any questions, my gut tells me I haven’t communicated very well. A lack of questions is more a lack of understanding than anything else. If you’re getting questions, you have people probing and looking for clarity of some of the things you brought up.
When I’m not getting questions, I’ll start to ask questions. I’ll ask questions starting with senior people, then moving possibly down a level to begin getting their input into things in some of the more difficult areas. Then that starts to generate more questions from the audience.
Q. How do you deal with difficult topics?
Communication is a key. When someone screws up, and we all have, we get it up on the table in a hurry, we deal with it, and we put corrective actions in place. Hopefully some of those things never happen again, and we move forward.
I’m not going to say we don’t hold people accountable, we certainly do. We do understand that there is some level of error made by everyone. We like to deal with it and not punish too severely. If you do that, any time there is a mistake, all that is done is people try to hide it, which is really detrimental.
The key is when you make a mistake, be the first to admit you made a mistake. That’s one of the things I do. Everything I do sends signals to other people in the company about what’s the appropriate behavior.
If you begin to identify that you have people who are trying to blame other people, you have a very serious conversation with them about why that’s not appropriate. Or you determine that they do not fit in with the group dynamic you’re trying to develop and you replace them.
