With the Governor of South Carolina vanishing for days without telling his security detail, his family and on Father’s Day no less to go hiking to clear his head, many people might wonder what the heck was he doing? Some illicit affair or scandal? The irony would be that had he just said, “I am going camping, yeah, I know it is Father’s Day, I just feel crappy and I need time to figure out what is going,” his aides and family might have been disappointed but would have said, “Sure, no problem, see you later Governor/Dad/etc.”
That is the springboard for today’s topic, boys and girls. It is important that if you are running the business, the chief operating officer or the supervisor in charge of the assembly line or even head bottlewasher that your team know where you are and what you want them to do.
Some managers run their businesses in a micro-management style. They arae very hands on and they watch their team members and review everything that they are doing. In some environments that works especially where redundancy checks are important like quality control or nuclear fission labs.
In other jobs, say sales over a region like the Western United States or even all of Western Europe you need to have a little more freedom with your staff to let them do their jobs. Each type of job is different and requires different management techniques and styles. The one thing that all of them require is communication. As our good friend the Governor of South Carolina discovered, communication is very important in the chain of command.
In the corporate setting, the communication lines can be something as simple as an email setting stating that you will be out of the office for a week or a voice message on your phone. You can even just have the boss pop his head into your cubicle or down the assembly line and say that he will be out for his daughter’s graduation the next day.
The importance of that is to make sure that the business keeps running and any issues or concerns (read that as problems) get resolved or that mechanisms are put in place to prevent problems from becoming serious show-stoppers.
Communication is also important to keep track of processing flows where somebody needs to do some kind of work and perhaps pass a file, a product or even an email to somebody else and there may need some sort of intervention of review. If somebody is out sick, you need to make sure that the contingency plan is in place so you have coverage.
Some managers feel that if they tell one person, that is enough and that will make it through the organization. That works fine if your company is three people and you are one of them. For other going concerns you need to communicate that you will be out, from what time to when, who to contact if there is an emergency and are you still reachable for those rare questions that demand a command decision that only you can give.
If you hold weekly team meetings, talk about vacation or days off then if you can so everybody else can plan accordingly and adjust their workload and expectations. Generally speaking, if somebody is out of the office, the work is shouldered by other people and sometimes that slows things down. If you are working for a firm that already has gone through several rounds of layoffs and are already multi-tasking your brains out you know what I am speaking of.
If you also get wind of a vendor or business partner that will be out of the office or not available by e-mail, please tell your associates if they have business with him on a regular basis as well. It has been my experience that you will save waiting time and grief even if they did remember to set up their e-mail to send back an out of the office response.
Remember to also spell out what you want in either voice mail, e-mail or speaking to your team. Despite the desire to keep things Twitter short, some business decisions and communications are greater than a few hundred words and your big contract may depend on following the client’s explicit instructions down to the final letter.
Make sure that if you have a business that is set up with e-mail that you have for the internal staff somewhere you can see the vacation and out of the office dates of everybody in the team. That way you can plan vacations and know who is where and you shouldn’t have frantic telephone calls from your bodyguards asking you why you chose Father’s Day to make a getaway and go for a hike in the woods.
June 24 2009
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Kim Isaac Greenblatt
Management Communication Snafus