Great leadership starts with listening and asking questions. Getting your MBWA, Management by Walking Around, might be the easiest suggestion you can heed to make you a better leader today.
Transcript
Steve Rice: So I’m curious. If you were handed a – let’s just pretend it’s a $20 million company that makes handles and door knobs. Is it possible to ask the questions, “What systems would you put in place? And what things would you do to create the culture that you wanted for that company?”
Stephen Sendar: The only time it would be possible for me to do that, up front going in, it would have to have two factors. The first one, it obviously would have to be an industry I knew well. But the second factor is it would have to be a company that already had self-awareness enough that what they told me was true about their people and their systems and the way they worked was actually what was happening on the floor of the business every single day.
And so I would never agree to that in general, because I’m an MBWA (Management By Walking Around) kind of a person, which is I go sit around with everybody. I just sit around and I talk to everybody, and I figure out what’s actually going on for everybody. And then I know how to say, “Here are the places we need to create systems in order to support this group.”
So It’s hard for me to see a framework to impose on something until I know what’s going on inside. How you get there, you might have a goal framework, but how you get there is always based on who is in the company and who is actually staying and who is going to self-select out once you start requiring a different level of ‘being an adult’. You know, it’s the old Netflix thing: If we don’t have adults working here, let’s help them find a job where they can get along, and let’s terminate it really quickly, and move everybody along. Let’s just be adults about it.