Every moment he is on the job, Andrew Roth carries two of his best communication tools with him.
They’re called shoes.
Roth, the president of 180-employee Notre Dame College, says there is no substitute for getting out of your office and interacting with your employees as often as possible. In-person engagement of his employees is central to his communication strategy.
“You need to be accessible to the people you serve, however briefly,” Roth says. “You need to get back to them with an answer to their problems. You need to respond.”
Smart Business spoke with Roth about how you can use your feet to become a better communicator.
Q. What are some keys to effectively engaging employees?
There are two big ways of doing that. One is to stay on message, not having a flavor of the month. We’re constantly looking at our vision as building one of the finest comprehensive baccalaureate colleges in the Great Lakes region. A component of that is as a Catholic institution and as a residential college.
I said that in my inaugural speech six years ago. The focus changed and is now slightly different, but in every opportunity I get, every speech I give on campus, we come back to the vision. The message might be tweaked as times change, but the core message doesn’t change.
The second way I try to do it is every group I meet with, I try to talk to them about this in terms that would be of interest and appropriate to them. So when I’m talking to the faculty, we’re talking about education and classrooms. When I talk to the maintenance guys, I talk to them about how it’s important to maintain an institution that is worth what we charge for it, that our facilities are up to snuff. When I talk to our coaches, I talk about the need to recruit competent students, responsible campus citizens and athletes who can compete in that order.
So the answer is two parts: one, stay on mission, and two, when speaking to different constituents, articulate the mission and vision in terms that are appropriate and focused on their needs and interests.
When you know what you stand for, you don’t really have to give a lot of thought each time you’re called upon to talk. Make sure that you understand your organization’s mission and vision, so that you’ve internalized it and can articulate it. You want to internalize it to the point that you don’t really have to think about it. Then, take every opportunity, no matter where you are, to talk about the mission and vision. Every setting is a chance to reinforce the mission and vision.
