Sell your plan
In the old days, Smith or his father would either run the department themselves or meet with the person who ran the department and communicate exactly what they wanted to see happen. But as the company outgrew that structure, there was very little communication between department leaders. Smith needed to empower his leaders to work together and deal with company issues collaboratively.
“Part of the growing pain in a business comes when you have to give up some level of control,” Smith says. “As you hire a good team, you have to give up some of your personal control and have faith that they will do it properly.”
In order for that to work, those department heads needed to talk to each other. If the marketing department was planning a product sale, the customer service department needed to know the details and be able to intelligently field questions from the customers.
Smith began sitting down with each of his department leaders on an individual basis to discuss instituting a monthly meeting of department heads.
The goal of the sessions was to put the plan on the table and get feedback from his leaders.
“I discussed the issues I saw and they talked about what they saw,” Smith says. “My approach has always been to not order people to do things. I have a discussion. I have a target to convince them that this is the right thing to do.”
Smith wanted his department leaders to work more closely together, and he knew that doing so would benefit the company. So he wasn’t taking a straw poll to determine whether this effort would go forward. It was going to happen.
But Smith also knew that if it was going to work, these leaders had to buy in to his idea and had to feel like the plan would enable them do their jobs better. He had to show them how the regular dialogue among the department heads would help the company in the long run.
“I want them to feel good about it, and I want them to see my point of view,” Smith says. “With each person, I took their point of view and showed them how they would benefit from this. I had a different conversation with everybody, but when you talk about teamwork and better communication, it’s very hard to argue against that.”
The individual meetings were fairly unstructured in that Smith did not draw up a chart and schedule each meeting in advance. He also did not tell the leaders he was meeting with about his conversations with their peers to ensure that each person he met with was coming into the meeting with the same knowledge and perspective.
“I’m big on the free flow of ideas,” Smith says.
Meetings might be held in the morning or they could be scheduled for later in the day. One might take place in his office, and another at the office of the particular leader he was speaking with.
“I like to show them how it’s going to help them broaden their programs or in some ways, lighten their load,” Smith says. “Everyone realizes, whether it’s sales or marketing, nothing can be successful on its own. Getting the buy-in from other departments clearly makes their jobs easier.”
