Weekend MBA provides ideas on running better businesses and succeeding in the modern workplace, this week from Harvard Business Review and Jim Whitehurst, chief executive of Red Hat and author of “The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Purpose.”
This might sound obvious, but if you want to build a more engaged workforce you need to, well, engage. That means, whether you are a CEO or a frontline manager, you need to work hard to connect, face-to-face, with your people. That can mean anything from walking around and making stops in offices and cubicles to holding town hall discussions. But most leaders simply can’t make time to sit down with every person in the company, in every office around the world. So what should leaders do instead?
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In my experience as CEO of Red Hat, I’ve learned to find ways to connect with associates when I can, either in person when the opportunity presents itself, or virtually via e-mail and other electronic correspondence. Being accessible and approachable is critical to effective leadership.
As powerful as accessibility is, I’ve learned that nothing builds engagement more than being accountable to the people in your organization. You simply have to have the confidence to own your mistakes and admit when you’re wrong.
Being a leader doesn’t mean that you’re always right or that you won’t err. What being a leader does mean is airing the reasons you did something and then making yourself accountable for the results — even if those you’re accountable to don’t directly work for you.
That’s how you truly sow the seeds of engagement. Think about it: whom would you rather trust — the person who denies anything is amiss or the person who admits error and then follows up with a plan to correct it? Better yet, what if that same person who admits making a mistake reaches out to his or her team for ideas on how to make things right? I’ve found that leaders who show their vulnerability, and admit they are human, foster greater engagement among their associates.
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I speak from experience. Early on in my tenure as chief executive of Red Hat, we acquired a company whose underlying technology wasn’t entirely open source. Rewriting the code and making it open source was going to mean months of work, something I didn’t think we could afford. So, after much debate and back-and-forth, I made the call to go to market with the product as is. Big mistake. It soon became clear that both our associates and our customers disliked the product. There was only one thing to do at that point: rewrite the code. Only instead of being a few months behind schedule, we would be off by more than a year. Ouch.
Of course, there was quite a bit of anger and frustration among Red Hatters about the extended delay. But I owned it. I admitted I was wrong and pledged that we were going to do our best to address the mistake.
I realized that our associates deserved to hear the story of why we made the decision as much as the board of directors did. When you don’t make the time to explain why you made your decision, people will often assume the worst all on their own: that you’re detached, dumb, or don’t care. But when I made the time to explain the rationale — that we had, in fact, put a lot of thought into it—people finally understood.
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Many Red Hatters told me how much they appreciated that I admitted my mistake. They also appreciated that I explained how I came to the decision in the first place. That earned me their trust. If you want to have engaged employees, in other words, you need to explain why decisions are made. That’s how you build engagement — which also makes you a stronger leader.
In short, being accessible, answering questions, admitting mistakes, and saying you’re sorry aren’t liabilities. They are the tools you can use to build your credibility and authority to lead.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review.