What you know and don’t

Well I have always believed one of the challenges of sitting in senior leadership positions is you begin to know less about what is going on inside your company. As I sit in my corner office today, I always ask myself what I don’t know is going on. While I do lean heavily on my staff to check the tempature of the employees constantly, I try to “walk around”. Even then I know I don’t know.

Each of my staff members have different leadership styles and connections to everyone. Two of my staff members have been at the company for a long time, they are my wisdoms. They have seen the march of time and the constant battles of enthrophy and order. They are deeply connected to a group of employees that are becoming uncomfortable. They are part of the group that is dwindling, the long timers. The long timers are starting to retire, and as they do, new employees come on board. For me, I know I have a long timer when I hear, “I remember when the company…”. A stuble complaint against change. The rest of my staff are almost as new as I am. In addition to being new to our company, they are new to each other and the employees. Each one feeling out their ways with interacting. All of us thinking we know what we actually don’t.

There is a drumbeat starting to happen in my jungle here. Its a beat that I have heard numerous times. “Boom, employee, boom, morale, boom, is, boom, getting, boom bad, crash of cymbals”. I find myself at the point of hearing it louder than I was I expect and it is time to checkin to see what I don’t know.

I am afraid it is time to play the “employee survey” counter beat to try to figure out what I don’t know. This is an exercise I have done a few times now in different roles. My first experience really openned my eyes to how it can go wrong with the leadership doesn’t realize they might just not know. I was in the room and watch the senior leadership go over results of the survey. It has a lot of open ended questions that allowed for the employees to write, write, write their thoughts. The leadership spent more time figuring out who wrote what and if they didn’t like the message that was being shared, they typically discounted it once they were able to figure out who they thought wrote it and label the author as a trouble maker. That survey did just the opposite. The drum beat got louder.

A year later after that, I was asked to facilite the next survey. I told leadership I would be willing to do so, but we were going to do it differently. This time, I told leadership that I would go through the responses and “edit” them. I basically rewrote the answers and put them in various categories. It was agreed, but I kid you not; once the answers came back, leadership wanted to know who said what. I did not even entertain the question and ultimately kept their eyes to the topic of answers.

Of course their is balance point of introducing my own bias when doing this exercise, but at the time the leadership needed to have that risk if they were serious to trying to figure out what they didn’t know.

Today, I am the leader of the leaders and concerned as I am seeking to find out what I don’t know, that I don’t fall into the same trap. With ChatGPT and my suspicous eye towards survey, I am crafting my own.

It is time to try to figure out what I don’t know.

at27