All right, this is uh Jerry short 17. Um And the last one I wound up talking about uh emotional intelligence. So this time I'll talk about rounding. There we go. What's going on Reder Nation? This is Jerry from Beyond the rut. And this is another installment of Jerry's short. 

These are the short segments of the show that get you over the weekend into Monday with a practical tip or tool to help pull out for your rut into a life worth living in your faith, family and career. Right now, I've got a focus on leadership. So if you feel like your leadership career is in a rut or that your team is in a rut, this is definitely the series for you. Uh I kicked it off with an overview of stake, your leadership tent and then the last, the next two episodes or the next last two installments. 

However, you want to say it were about things you could do as a leader to build trust with your team. So trust, building being the first stake in the ground as a leader. Now, the next thing I want to talk about uh kind of combines three of these stakes together, trust, building, empowering, and maybe even navigating, but mostly trust building and empowering. So we'll focus on the empowering part because I think with empowering, you're not just empowering actions that I provide logistics, they could do their job. I uh develop their decision making pro uh prospects, they can make decisions without me being there all the time. 

A lot of us think that that strictly means writing policies and how to manuals. However there's critical thinking needed. And we'll talk about that in another installment. But I'm talking about specifically here, empowering voice of your employees. So you got empowering of action, you got empowering of voice uh and somewhere in there empowering of decision making. So there is a practice I learned from helping leaders in health care uh called rounding with employees. Uh I believe the executives who work at Walt Disney Company do something very similar. In fact, I think if I remember correctly, healthcare learned about this from hospitality industries and, and companies like Walt Disney. So the idea is, you know, you've all heard about the open door policy. 

Oh, I got an open door. Whenever that door is open, people come in, they can ask me questions and we can navigate through things. Well, that's fine. You know, if somebody has an emergency, they have something to vent. But then think about the impact on you. Uh somebody wants to make a decision, they're not sure about it, they come to you now you've been derailed. Um Somebody has a problem with another employee. 

They come to you. You get derailed. Uh When you do what I'm gonna talk about, you're intentional, you're pouring into your people. Uh You are helping them feel cared for, listened to and you may even discover the opportunities for growth for your employees. So here's the rundown here. It takes a little bit more time to unpack, but rounding with your employees is not an open door policy. It's the opposite. It's a very intentional outward activity where you the leader decide I'm going to meet with one or two or three people on my team each day. And I'm gonna ask them some very intentional questions to get a pulse of how they're doing and uh what could be done better. So that's it. So if you have like 30 employees working with you, you probably can fit in one or two people a day for about 15 minutes. That's it. 30 minutes a day. 

Now, if you have 60 like 30 to 60 employees, this is from Quint Steer Group, uh the Steer group. Um If you have 30 to 60 employees, maybe once every two months, you're having this conversation. And if you have upwards around 90 people in your organization that report directly to you, then uh you're closer to about once every quarter. Now, now, if you're in an executive role, I think that'd be a great idea. Once a quarter, touching base with people shaking hands with folks. Uh However, if your span of control is that wide, it's gonna be very impossible for you to, to have. So ideally, if you have 90 people working under your domain, uh hopefully you have some subordinate leaders to kind of break up that span of control for you. So the idea is you've prescriptively listed. 

I'm gonna meet with Johnny and I'm gonna meet with Susie tomorrow for 15 minutes each. I've already scheduled the time with them. They'll meet in my office and this is meant to be a positive uh check in to see how things are going. So they come in, this is not the annual performance review. You're not evaluating the performance at all. 

This is you strictly getting information from your employees, you're giving them a voice, you're giving them a stage to share with you the state of affairs in your team, your company and so on. So during your 15 minutes with them, you want to establish some rapport, let them know that this is just a check in. Um and you know, get to know them, connect with them on a personal level. So that's the first thing you do is connect with them on a personal level. Now, the second thing you want to do is ask them what's going well, you know, what are things going on lately in the department or in the company that have been going really well. So you give them a chance to speak highly of the organization. 

Here's where you get some feedback on things that may not be going well, you ask them. So the third thing is what's not going well, what are some things that could be done better? And then the fourth thing, you go right into what are some ideas, you might have to uh improve a process or improve a a workflow that we have. So now you're drawing ideas from them and they may not have a specific process improvement. 

Maybe it's just like, hey, you know, we serve Pepsi, you know, well, I guess I can't say a name brand. We serve one brand of soda in the cafeteria, but I like this other company. Is there a way to get both in there? That might be all it takes to make people happy, look into it. So those are the first four, the fifth one is, and this helps with building trust between you and your employee, but also helps build trust and respect across the people in your department and ask them who is somebody who is doing a great job that you've noticed and get from them, the details. You know, what was it that made that a great job? 

What what made that person go above and beyond versus somebody else just simply doing their job and you get the details from them. So that's it. That's, that's all, you're having a conversation over for 15 minutes or less. So, how are things going with you? How is life, how is that barbecue you went to last week or if you went camping? What was that trip like? You don't want to dwell there? 

Uh, and then find out what's working. Well, what's not? What ideas do you have to improve things around here? Uh, who's somebody that you like to recognize? And that should be enough to get going and thank them for their time. 

Tell them what a great job they're doing. How great it is to have them on board. You know, if you can give them a genuine compliment, do that. That has always been a genuine specific compliment on the work they do and how it connects to the bigger picture goes a long way and that's it for that interaction and then you do it with somebody else uh now on a regular basis and, you know, I don't know if you've done this. Were you given feedback? You never heard from them again? Break that. So these folks are giving you input, they're telling you what's working well, they're telling you what's not working well, they're giving you ideas on how to make things better. 

They're even giving recognition to other people. So do something like a stoplight report where you tell them, hey, the things in green, these are the things that I got done for you. Uh Because I've heard you yellow. I'm still working on these things. Red is either no or not right now. And here are the reasons why and then you can even talk about the new things added to that chart and put that chart somewhere in like a break room or an email. Um and talk about those things just a little bit on top of that. 

Any recognition that you received from these employees during your rounding sessions publicly acknowledge the people if that's the way they like to be acknowledged. So that goes a little bit deeper than that, but recognize the people who were recognized by your employees that does two things. One, somebody who wasn't expected to get recognized, gets recognized and realizes my boss realizes I work hard. And then on top of that, the person who made the recognition, realizes my boss heard me, not only heard me but acknowledged it publicly for all to hear that made me feel good. So there you have it. That is something you could do that not only builds more trust with your team, it helps empower the voice of the people around you. And on top of that, you might discover some things around um projects to work on which you can now delegate out to your team as a project and help grow them. Now, we're out of time here. If you wanted to see the show notes about this, you go to beyond the rut dot com. Slash 017. And there you'll find links to uh the tent overview other episodes I've talked about and uh how to reach me if you want me to share this content on a deeper level with your organization, until next time, go live life beyond the rut. Take care.