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Martha Stewart and Susan Lyne
Martha Stewart and Susan Lyne
Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an interview with Susan Lyne, currently the CEO of Gilt Groupe, an online luxury retailer, and formerly the president/CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She also is the past president of ABC Entertainment.
In this article, she discusses a unique leadership technique adapted from the halls of academe. As the CEO, she maintains weekly “office hours” where any employee can book a half hour block of time to sit down and speak with her.
Developing Best Practices for Leadership
From the article in the New York Times, Lyne discusses her inspiration for the concept and the beneftis:
The other thing that I have done, increasingly, was really triggered by a conversation I had with a young Silicon Valley executive, Marissa Mayer, who mentioned that she did office hours every week. She was a professor before she came to Google, and she kept office hours going, and she said it was a really useful way to kind of access the engineers’ real ideas. Not the ideas that come out of a meeting, but, “What are you excited about?” And it sounded like an interesting concept to me. I do it now — I try to do it two hours a week, where anyone from our company can book half an hour with me.
It’s turned out to be a fantastic way to find out what’s bubbling under the surface and what’s not coming across to people. And a surprising number of people will book time with me who are significantly down the food chain. In some cases it’s because they want to have a little face time with me so that they can get noticed. But there’s always something that’s on their mind.
And when you are running a company it’s very hard to get below a certain level, maybe one level below your direct reports. It does give me a way to get to know people a little better that I pass in the hallway or I see in the Monday all-hands meeting. It’s also a great early-warning system for something that may be either misunderstood or a challenge within a department.
How do other CEOs maintain touch points with their associates? Are there any CEOs out there who will share ideas?
What does your HR department do to promote effective communication with leaders?
We’d love to hear from you in the comments!
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