As a leader when you think of effective communication think of the telephone lines we made as kids that consisted of two tin cans and a piece of string. You could yell and yell, but until that line was pulled taut, words could not flow in both directions. The moment you heard a reply, it was like magic. Proper and effective communication is just like that, it has to flow in both directions to create that magical feeling of success.

Logging companies that are on the cutting edge of the industry are starting to focus more and more on the soft skills of management. I was hired by a savvy young logger to work on these types of issues to help maximize production. Formal lines of communication did not exist, which led to a whole host of problems such as rumors, backstabbing, and sometimes low morale. Frankly, I was a little overwhelmed, but I had to start somewhere.

The first thing I did was institute weekly staff meetings, sounds easy doesn't it? This was my biggest accomplishment and the hardest to maintain. Meetings had to happen at the crack of dawn. They had to take place before the start of production and right on the landing of our current job. We couldn't meet during, or at the end of the day, for once things were set in motion, everyone was moving in different directions until quitting time. Our truck drivers were back and forth to the mills all day delivering round wood, biochips or pine chips. Our skidders traveled back and forth from the woods hauling trees to the landing. The harvester took off deep into woods cutting trails and laying out the hitches. Our excavation crew was always busy, and sometimes they were working on a totally different job.

Every Thursday morning at 6:30 everyone was expected on the current job for our weekly staff meeting. This included office staff as well. This simple act opened up the lines of communication between the office and the job site. Before my arrival, employees from the office were viewed as a source of pain, always trying to extract some type of information from the crew. Once they saw the bookkeeper as a real person with her own set of problems, they began to understand the whole picture. At these meetings she could coach them to make her job easier and more efficient. In the beginning everyone hated the staff meetings. Some refused to speak, and some went so far as to ridicule the concept entirely.

We kept the agenda very simple, the crew supervisor began the meetings by talking about

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