Aveek Mukherjee learned the value of bottom-up communication with the encouragement of his mentor Denis McGee. Aveek concedes that he is naturally impatient; he tends to finish people’s sentences. He is action oriented and just wants them to get on with it. He observed that Denis had the ability to listen, to put himself in the other person’s shoes and then analyse the situation. It prompted Aveek to adopt skip level meetings to take the pulse with the 16,000-strong Wells Fargo team based in India and The Philippines.
He found it was easy when operating at a distance from his team members to assume that things were happening as he expected. But these meetings gave him a real glimpse into the organisation, what was going on and how to fix it. In Aveek’s experience communication in large organisations is usually one-dimensional, from top to bottom. Sure, the business did an engagement survey once a year. But he felt the structured questions did not give enough details. He wanted a process where he could not only take the pulse of the organisation but also do something about fixing the issues.
Aveek found that taking the pulse of his organisation in this way was a valuable investment of his time. Bottom-up communication enabled him to achieve big results in his organisation. He attributes much of his success to this practice.
In his book Organizational Traps, Professor Chris Argyris discusses several case studies to illustrate how good leaders often get trapped by not recognising the gaps that exist between what they believe and what is happening day to day.
Aveek’s practice of regularly taking the pulse of the organisation by holding skip level meetings is an effective way of helping to close this gap by directly listening to people doing the front-line work.
These leadership insights from Aveek Mukherjee are outlined in more detail in the new book, which Dean Phelan and I co-authored – The Gentle Art of Leadership. The perspectives we gathered from our interviews with 50+ leaders from around the globe and the original research we drew on, form the basis of the book.
Grab your copy here.
🙋♀️ What are some practical ways you can adopt to take the pulse in your organisation? 🙋
PS: Learn a new approach to taking the pulse in your organisation in the next Personality and Behaving Transactionally Program.
Best regards, Brian