Good listeners make good leaders.

• Author: Nelson, Bob
• Position: Rewarding Employees

Ever puzzled by a problem at work? Problems like: How to enhance customer service? How to improve your numbers? Decrease errors? Managers often spend hours analyzing reports and brainstorming potential solutions to problems and challenges of the business; yet often the answers already exist, waiting to be tapped simply by asking your employees.

Case in point, Steve Heller, an assistant manager at Costco Wholesale in Carlsbad, Calif., recently told me how he and his front-end managers were racking their brains to find ways to improve the productivity of their cashiers. He knew he had good people who were committed to doing good work, but like most managers, he viewed problem solving as his domain. So when the store was consistently below the company s goal for the speed at which clerks processed customers at the checkout registers, he met with other managers to develop a "hit list" of solutions. It seemed like the logical thing to do.

Afterward, as he was leaving the meeting, he noticed a cashier, Pam LaBlanc, on the Top Performers Board for the first lime and decided to go congratulate her on her success. Picking up a lunch coupon for pizza and a soda for her, he went to thank her and asked: "How were you able to reach that goal?" Her answer came as a surprise to him.

Pam said to reach her goal she needed the help of others around her. As a result, she took time to make suggestions as to how assistants could help her speed firings up and to ask, in turn, for the assistant's ideas and suggestions. "Since she works with different co-workers almost every day, it became an ongoing discussion of sharing and learning from each other." She went on to elaborate with specifics.

"I learned more in 15 minutes about improving the productivity of cashiers," Steve said, "than hours of discussion and brainstorming I had done on my own and with...