I'm told by our internal surveys that we take of customers - by customers themselves directly and by a very large group of our employees - that there's a new spirit at United.
Our most important, and sometimes most severe, judges are our subordinates.
I've learned that it's important to listen to employees at all levels, to engage them, to empower them. Whether you're a first-line supervisor or the head of an entire agency, you should be asking career staffers, 'What do you think?'
Incredibly, whenever I have proposed the theory that half of government workers could be cut, current and former federal employees I know have all agreed.
On a personal level, I send out about 20 thank-you notes a day to staffers, on all levels. And every six weeks I have lunch with a group of a dozen or so employees, to get their perspective on the business, to address problems and to get feedback.
There are very few people who work for me who are afraid to tell me what I don't want to hear.
The highest compliments leaders can receive are those that are given by the people who work for them.
The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.
As leaders, we owe it to every employee to let them know where they stand in the organization.
An exceptional company is the one that gets all the little details right. And the people out on the front line, they know when things are not going right, and they know when things need to be improved. And if you listen to them, you can soon improve all those niggly things which turns an average company into an exceptional company.
The people inside the company, generally two to three levels down, they know best what's wrong and how to fix it. It's just that their voices aren't being heard. I listen for words, tonality, and language.
A leader must listen to those under their supervision.
It is amazing what colleagues tell you about the inefficiencies and about what works and what doesn't. It is a real-life check on our ideas.
Your employees have lots of opinions about everything - your strategy and vision; the state of the competition; the quality of your products; the vibe in the workplace. There are tons of things you can learn from them.
I have to tell you, I'm a great teacher. Ask anybody who worked for me, except some secretaries who weren't very good.
Instead of me telling them what they need to work on, I wanted to hear from them what they needed to work on.
You have no right to be a leader if someone who works for you doesn't know where they stand.
Never stop listening to people at all levels of the company. Be physically out and about so that you always have your finger on the pulse and know, at the ground level, the truth of how people are feeling.
Your typical business just measures the metrics that have to do with the profitability of the business one way or another. But you can have metrics that measure employee happiness and the morale. You can also do direct customer surveys; you can track it over time. You can do supplier satisfaction scores as well.
In Holland, you can step into the manager's office and ask him for clarity if you don't know why you're not playing and they are open with you.
I've decided I don't want to be a manager. Every time you try to be responsive to your employees, they say you're being reactive and not proactive. And when you try to be proactive, they accuse you of being capricious and arbitrary. So I don't wanna be a manager.
A lot of companies lock up for a few weeks once a year for performance reviews. But there's a way to collect feedback in real time from Slack so that by the end of the year, you've already stored up all of this information.
Ask yourself: would you be comfortable printing everything your employees, customers & partners have to say about your culture?
As a decision maker, you rely on information being passed to you by the people who report to you. As the CEO, however, you cannot rely solely on this information. You also need to 'dip' down into your organization and learn directly from employees at all levels and virtually all skill sets.
You gain a lot of insight from employees by listening to them.
