Hi! I am Jim Muehlhausen, author of the 51 Fatal Business Errors and I am here talking about Fatal Error # 2, Revolving Door Policy, which is my name for an Open Door Policy. Not a big fan of Open Door Policies because of couple of reasons. One, your time is the most valuable time in the organization.
Think about an hour of your time versus an hour of your people's time. It's a horrible trade to let your people come into your office and announce and trade your time for theirs, because in your organization you are always the bottleneck. The speed of which, your organization moves is a speed that you move. And so if you have an open door it allows the situation where we can make a bad tradeoff, trading your time for their time.
An Open Door Policy just facilitates this and takes responsibility away from your people and plops it on to you. Now, if you buy into that, which I am hoping that you do. What you do is you would take a couple of action steps. One, your schedules have Open Door time. I don't think that you leave your door closed all the time, but move it around some in the morning, some in the afternoon, some days on, some days off. But what we want to do is no transference of problems from them to you and so the easiest way to do that is get out of the office, it's the ultimate Close Door Policy.
The last thing that you could do -- I saw a great door sign in California one time, and it said, "Do not enter this office with a problem unless you have a corresponding solution." Now I have this little saying, it's that there is two consequent points. And they are the kind of work employees that plop problems on to your desk and they are the kind of employees that take problems off of your desk. If you are like most business owners you have a lot more A then you do a B. God loves the B people, we love those, those are your stars, right. That's how you tell that they are stars, if they take the problems off your desk, they are your superstars.
Point meaning, the people that are problem ploppers, love those Open Door Policies. They are the ones that abuse them. So what I am going to encourage you to do is at least try to rein them in. You are never going to get rid of them. You are never going to throw your place off with people that don't come and plop problems on your desk.
However, you can enforce it in a very easy fashion by just making it more difficult for them to do it. Believe me, they will find a way to do it. So I hope that you have enjoyed this error, I look forward to talking to you next week.
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